Johnston Press plc
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Due to the business-critical nature of the functions which needed extending, MIS recognised that the solution would require a highly resilient and fault-tolerant hardware server platform.

Leveraging its close association with Hewlett-Packard, MIS collaborated with the HP team to design a server solution powerful enough to deliver the Miles 33 applications to the remote operating companies using Windows Terminal Services and robust enough to sustain multiple failures of server components without a catastrophic failure of the servers themselves.

This was achieved using server clustering built on HP's MSA1000 SAN fibre fabric. This technology enabled MIS to lay the foundations of a migration path to a storage area network utilising existing HP/Compaq servers and disk systems, thus preserving Johnston Press' investment in existing hardware. Furthermore, the MSA1000 SAN fabric supports up to 6 Terabytes of highly redundant storage. Equally important, HP's software management tools made it possible to adopt a preventative approach to system maintenance for the management and administration of the Northampton data centre.

As a business-critical application, it was imperative that provision was made for an off-site installation to assume the role of the primary systems. Such a system was installed in the Milton Keynes centre of Premier Newspapers, one of the South Midlands division companies. Transaction log shipping across the Johnston Wide Area Network ensures that the remote systems are synchronised so that in the event of a disaster at the primary location, the newspapers are still produced.

As is typical in the newspaper industry, much of the page composition is undertaken using Quark Xpress on the Macintosh platform. Quark uses links to page components held on a shared storage system that are lost when failing over to the second node in a cluster. This issue is compounded by the fact that Microsoft clustering is a function of Windows Advanced Server, which does not support Services for Macintosh, the 'out of the box' support for Macintosh in Windows Server. This presented a problem where the fail-over to the second node has to be manually undertaken, so undermining the objective of achieving continuity of services when the primary server fails.

MIS identified a third party implementation of Macintosh support in Windows Advanced Server called ExtremeZ-IP. This application replaces Services for Macintosh in Windows Server (when running in non-cluster mode) and provides Services for Macintosh where they are otherwise not available in Windows Advanced Server. Not only does ExtremeZ-IP support Macintosh services in a cluster, so enabling an automatic fail-over to the second node, but it is also a higher performance and much more robust implementation of Services for Macintosh.

Johnston Press South Midlands division implemented an extremely secure publishing system that provides a high degree of fault tolerance. Building these systems using HP's SAN fabric provided a clear upgrade path for a full SAN implementation in the future.

In implementing this system, MIS helped to address Johnston's South Midlands division's disaster planning strategy, contributing to business continuity across the division and retention of profits as a consequence.