Thursday, 19 July 2007

Taiwan Newspaper Deploys Datacraft Digital Media Management Solution

IT solutions and services company, Datacraft has implemented its digital media management solution at Taiwan’s local newspaper, Apply Daily, to help meet the newspaper meet its deadlines.

The Apple Daily is a colourful newspaper which relies heavily on photos and illustrations to capture the interest of its readers. The Digital Library System (DLS) on which these images are stored and accessed is therefore a critical resource which must be available 24x7, 365 days a year.

The paper selected Datacraft to design and implement a solution to ensure that the DLS is not only efficient and available to be meet the needs of today, but protected against disasters and scalable enough to meet future needs.

Datacraft's analysis of Apple Daily's current system revealed three main issues. The first was expansion; the maximum capacity of the DVD jukeboxes used by the newspaper was 620 discs. The second was performance; retrieving data from the jukebox took time and required frequent disk changes. The third and perhaps most important issue was data protection and security; retrieving and reading data from DVDs is not totally reliable and secure, as the data/files could be unreadable or stolen.

"In addition, Apple Daily maintains five file servers for artwork, editing, source, production as well as sales and advertising purposes. However, the servers neither have a comprehensive back-up mechanism to deliver a highly available network nor disaster recovery capability," said Benjamin Wang of Datacraft Taiwan.

To address the three key issues, Datacraft implemented a solution which core performance lies in a series of 500GB Fiber Channel hard disks that deliver maximum accessibility and are installed in a RAID5 configuration for data protection. Disaster recovery is assured by the powerful MirrorView solution.

The new solution implemented by Datacraft is expected to bring considerable improvements on Apple Daily's operations. The risks of a disaster are greatly reduced and the potential impact minimised. There is also room to scale up – the new solution is easily capable of expanding to store up to 60 terabytes of data.