Customer Stories

posted on 13 August 2008 09:07

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Trinity Mirror, publisher of the famous Daily Mirror tabloid newspaper, has switched the publishing of its three national newspapers - The Daily Mirror, The Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People - to run on an HP BladeSystem c-Class infrastructure.

The company needed to speed up its daily production by getting faster performance from its publishing software. To compensate for limitations of the previous 8-years old Sun servers and free up processing power, the IT department had been forced to temporarily disable the group's business continuity system, risking further delay if the system was to fail.

The three titles, managed from Canary Wharf in London, have been supported since April this year by HP's BladeSystem servers housed in two new state-of-the art data centers in Reading and Birmingham. As well as handling the daily running of the systems supporting all three publications, HP provides storage and business continuity to the company.

Trinity Mirror switched to two HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosures each containing six HP ProLiant BL480c Quad Core blade servers running Linux. Storage and business continuity is provided via an HP StorageWorks 6100 Enterprise Virtual Array. The company chose these blade servers for their performance, small footprint, reliability, energy efficiency and lower total cost of ownership.

"We need an infrastructure that gives us high availability; we haven't got time for any inefficiency. Our operation is pretty much 24-hour - there's maybe only two hours at most when no one is working within the publishing software. The new system is a huge improvement on its predecessor - it doesn't even break into a sweat," said Peter Raettig, IT Operations Manager at Trinity Mirror.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}