New York Daily News Keeps the Systems Running with EMC

Hopkinton, Mass. - January 09, 2007 -

"We are a 24x7 operation," said Joe Pennisi, the New York Daily News' Vice President of Information Technology, "and deliver a new product every day to more than 2.4 million readers. Our Daily News online edition has 5.9 million unique users per month. Time sensitive workflows from advertising, editorial, and circulation (through print and online distribution), leverage many business critical applications. These processes throughout the various verticals within our organization utilize EMC storage and software to help us get our daily news to our loyal readership. When the New York Daily News brought its outsourced mainframe operations in-house and moved those applications to a Unix environment, it decided to consolidate all of its storage, including dispersed server-based storage, onto an EMC CLARiiON® storage area network (SAN) and an EMC Celerra® network-attached storage (NAS) gateway.

"We would not have considered bringing our mission-critical applications in-house if we weren't able to utilize a storage solution that is as reliable as EMC's and backed by their advanced software," Pennisi said. "Consolidating on EMC across our SAN and NAS environments has given us increased reliability and lower management costs through centralized control of our storage. In fact, EMC has notably contributed to a reduction in our system support costs."

To support its information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy, the New York Daily News tiers its storage with CLARiiON storage systems with Fibre Channel drives designated to ensure high availability and fast response time for its wide variety of mission-critical applications, such as PeopleSoft, Oracle, data warehousing, SQL Server environments and applications used for advertising electronic publishing. With the Celerra NAS gateway, the New York Daily News is able to centrally manage file storage, printing and sharing to dramatically improve its information infrastructure and increase the New York Daily News' IT savings. The daily paper uses cost-effective CLARiiON ATA drives to support file sharing and data backups.

The newspaper also uses EMC NetWorker® software to centralize the recovery management of all its data, including NAS, data warehousing and SQL Server environments, Oracle databases, UNIX and Windows file systems, to CLARiiON ATA based storage before transferring the backups to tape.

"The performance increase was dramatic after we deployed EMC NetWorker with the NDMP options and new fiber channel LTO-2 tape silos," said Pennisi. "With backup and recovery to and from disk via the SAN, we can back up the same amount of data five times faster than with our previous solution and without any impact on our network performance. To create a single issue of the newspaper, we constantly transmit 10- to 300-megabyte files across our enterprise at any given time, so network performance is absolutely critical."

To protect data on another level, the publication uses EMC SnapView™ software to take snapshots of its production environment throughout the day to ensure that if any corruption of data access occurs, staff can quickly go back to a previous snapshot taken before the corruption happened. "This feature is particularly important on the revenue side with our advertising system," said Pennisi. "If we lose that information, it could take several personnel hours to manually recover that data whereas, with SnapView, we can now recover in about 15 minutes."

Pennisi credits the solid EMC storage and software as well as the extensive training and phone support EMC gave his directors and front-line staff for the stability of his EMC environment. "When we started this project, my team had limited knowledge of storage area networks," Pennisi explained. "EMC Global Services not only helped them get up to speed, but also assisted in the implementation phase to ensure our success."