So MediaNews installed Redline's appliance, primarily to translate the URLs, which gave the app servers a rest. The new device also manages all inbound client connections, and its compression feature helped cut download times nearly in half for many of MNG's sites. It also saved the company about $5,000 a month in extra bandwidth costs, Marsh says.
MediaNews may still use the Redline appliance for translating vanity URLs like www.dailynews.com/auto that point to outside hosting sites, Marsh says. The appliance will mainly accelerate and compress content for MediaNews' readers, as well as provide SSL acceleration so that MediaNews can let readers subscribe to their pubs securely online rather than by phone. The publishing company will upgrade to version 7.0 of Vignette for managing, but not delivering, content, Marsh says, which is more the application's specialty.
MediaNews also won't scrap its existing server architecture with the new portal. The new software will run on the Windows 2000 or Windows 2000 Advanced Server platforms. The publishing company has upgraded its storage area network from 1 GB to 2 GB of storage and added storage virtualization software from Fujitsu to increase its I/O throughput and provide better management of its storage.
"We couldn't grow much further with the existing environment," Marsh says. "We've done all we can do performancewise."
A Tight Deadline
In the end, it was just too risky not to do something ASAP. MediaNews Group Interactive, the hosting division of MediaNews Group--publisher of the Denver Post and the seventh largest newspaper company in the U.S.--got the green light to buy a Web appliance earlier this year after convincing company executives that leaving its struggling Web site infrastructure as is would be disastrous.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
