Red Hat: The Foundation for Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Online Success

Industry: Media

Geography: Atlanta

Opportunity: Build a technology infrastructure for growing the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s online user base and implement system redundancy to achieve 100 percent uptime of applications

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat Cluster Suite, MySQL

Hardware: 19 servers – both IBM Blades and commodity hardware

Benefits: Achieved previously unmatched flexibility, reliability, and cost savings by developing an infrastructure that accommodates rapid growth while optimizing resources and improving performance with virtually no downtime

The Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) is one of the country’s oldest and most-respected daily newspapers. Winner of 10 Pulitzer Prizes over its 140-year history, the AJC serves the greater Atlanta area, and boasts a total print and online readership of more than 2.3 million each week. In 2003, the newspaper also began publishing accessAtlanta, a free weekly entertainment newspaper, to compete with the many free alternative tabloids that had recently emerged in its market. Although the daily print circulation of the AJC is approximately 350,000, and the Sunday circulation 525,000, the majority of its readership comes from AJC’s vast – and growing – online audience.

CHALLENGE

The newspaper business is in transition as print circulations decline and online advertising dollars grow in proportion to a rapidly increasing online readership. Realizing the strategic importance of its online business – by 2007, more than 3.35 million unique users were visiting the AJC Website each month – the AJC created the Internet Group to develop Web applications that would attract additional readers to the site.
“Advertising is key to the newspaper – online as well as print,” said Jim Lann, manager of internet systems at AJC. “To maximize advertising revenues, our group was given the challenge of attracting readers to AJC.com and getting them to stay awhile.”

SOLUTION
The newspaper wanted to move to open source solutions, so the first step was implementing a LAMP software stack, incorporating Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Next, the Internet Group needed to decide on a Linux solution provider. “We had to have very robust development and production environments, and needed to go with the Linux distribution that was not only the industry standard, but the gold standard,” said Lann.

Selecting a Linux solution turned out to be an easy decision for the AJC, which today runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux on 19 servers managed by the Internet Group, including development, production, application, and MySQL database servers running on IBM Blades as well as commodity hardware from various manufacturers.

As the LAMP infrastructure rapidly grew to include ruby on rails and django, the AJC quickly discovered it had to put a storage system in place that would provide complete redundancy for the new applications. “We needed as close to 100 percent uptime as possible, but didn’t have the budget to implement a full storage area network [SAN] solution,” said Lann.

To achieve this redundancy, the AJC again selected Red Hat solutions to set up a virtual file system on its hosted service provider’s servers. Using Red Hat Cluster Suite, the AJC was able to create a Network File System (NFS) share across the infrastructure so that developers wouldn’t need to push data out to each individual Web server. Additionally, the AJC needed a single location where both Web servers could access important content like image galleries and user-generated content. After consulting Red Hat, Lann installed a distributed redundant block device (DRBD) for creating a clustered/mirrored file system. “This turned out to be absolutely the right decision,” said Lann.

BENEFITS

The AJC began to reap the benefits of its Red Hat-based solution immediately. First, Red Hat’s reliability streamlined maintenance of the systems. Red Hat patches can be installed without worrying that they might break existing standard libraries. With other Linux distributions, the integrity of the included MySQL databases might not have been as reliable. “I know our MySQL databases will run just fine under Red Hat,” said Lann.

Red Hat solutions also provided the AJC with productivity benefits, allowing the newspaper to do more with less. “We have three administrators in our group, supporting 20 developers and 19 servers, and newspapers are a 24-hours-per-day, seven-days-per-week undertaking,” said Lann. “When there’s a problem, I get notified immediately. It’s not uncommon for knowledge of these problems to get escalated up the chain of command to my director, to the vice president and in some cases to the publisher. Our applications are that critical to the newspaper.”

The AJC has additionally experienced significant cost savings after implementing Red Hat’s Cluster Suite on top of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. The virtual file system that the AJC has created serves the same purpose as a storage area network (SAN), but saves the newspaper approximately $2,000 each month by itself. “We were able to create a very resilient cluster for our file share,” said Lann.

Red Hat solutions have also allowed for increased flexibility by providing support for a broad range of applications that create advertising revenue opportunities for the newspaper. In addition, the AJC’s Red Hat solution has contributed to an increase in Website traffic. When the Internet Group was formed in 2007, requests from data-driven Web applications were limited. Today, more than 33 percent of all requests are for Red Hat-supported applications.

The AJC has recently initiated another project to expand its use of Red Hat solutions. Its plans include loading a portion of its servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform in order to utilize the solution’s virtualization capabilities to create multiple virtual servers.

“Once we implement Red Hat’s virtualization capabilities in our Web infrastructure, the possibilities become endless,” said Lann. “We anticipate that we’ll have the ability to roll out new servers – including application and Web servers – within hours rather than days. In today’s datacenter, your capacity needs can grow extremely rapidly. This is especially the case at a newspaper. When a big story hits, our Websites just get pounded. We have to be ready to increase our capacity in hours, not days. Red Hat gives us that capability.”

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