Extra! Data-Center Project a Success

摘要

Overhauling your data center and consolidating servers can mean big benefits for your enterprise, but it also can be dangerous. Just ask the Chicago Tribune, which undertook a major server-consolidation project—and survived a big glitch—last year. As you may recall from our cover story "Don't Stop the Presses" (Aug. 19, 2004, ID# 2526/7), the nation's seventh-largest newspaper last year moved its critical applications from a mishmash of mainframes and older Sun servers to a new, dual-site data-center infrastructure based on Sun 15K servers. In a unique server-consolidation project, the Tribune clustered the Sun servers over a 2-mile distance, lighting up a dark-fiber, 1-Gbps link between two data centers. This configuration let the newspaper spread the processing load between the servers while improving redundancy and options for disaster recovery.