Company Success Stories - Grupo Clarín
The AMD Opteron™ Processor-based Sun Fire™ V20z Servers Help Grupo Clarín Improve Performance And Deliver Enhanced User Experience
Profile
Grupo Clarín
"Even when important news or major sports events impact our readers and drive increased traffic to our Web sites, we see no loss in performance. This is critically important to the experience we deliver to our users. - Juan Kedzierski, Chief Information Officer, Grupo Clarín"
Challenge:
- The Internet is strategically important to Argentinean media holding company, Grupo Clarín.
- The challenge for companies such as Grupo Clarín is finding a fast and reliable way to satisfy an ever-increasing volume of visitors who want constant access to information through digital media.
Solution:
- Grupo Clarín conducted an exhaustive evaluation of different server options, taking into account variables such as functionality, reliability, performance and price.
- After a thorough review, Grupo Clarín decided to purchase AMD Opteron™ processor-based Sun Fire™ V20z servers.
Impact:
-
Grupo Clarín Chief Information Officer Juan Kedzierski reports that he considers the improved customer experience to be the greatest asset provided by the new, high-performing AMD Opteron processor-based Sun Fire V20z servers.
- Based on these results, the company believes the new servers can handle twice the volume of traffic they now receive at critical times, and as much as three times the traffic at normal times – allowing for the future growth that the company anticipates.
Company Profile
Grupo Clarín is the leading communications media group in Argentina and one of the largest in Latin America. Its holdings include newspapers, magazines, radio stations, cable and open TV channels, audiovisual production, graphic design, telephony and Internet. The company employs more than 8,000 people.
Clarín Global develops specific vertical portals for Grupo Clarín. Grupo Clarín’s sites receive more than 50 percent of Internet visits in Argentina. One of its companies, PRIMA, is the leading provider of Internet access and content, based on unique monthly visitors.
Challenge
The use of the Internet as a mass media outlet represents a challenge for digital newspapers, raising the need to combine text, audio and image. Grupo Clarín’s Web site, www.clarin.com, is at the forefront of this important trend: this general news site’s multimedia special editions have received international awards, and its news service leverages multimedia synergy by using content from the company’s other TV and radio media.
The Web site www.clarin.com and the sports-oriented www.ole.com.ar sites are strategic for Grupo Clarín’s business. Each site currently has more than a million visitors each month and both continue to grow their number of unique users. The challenge for companies such as Grupo Clarín is finding a fast and reliable way to satisfy an ever-increasing volume of visitors that demand access to information through digital media.
“We felt that the servers hosting the main sites of the group were reaching their performance limits, thereby slowing response times,” said Juan Kedzierski, CIO of Grupo Clarín. “This propelled us to find a high-performance and highly reliable solution that would allow us to continue to expand.”
Solution
Grupo Clarín conducted an exhaustive evaluation of different server options, taking into account variables such as functionality, reliability, performance and price. The company also considered factors such as processor performance, scalability and the potential for the systems to meet future needs. After a thorough review, Grupo Clarín decided to purchase Sun Fire™ V20z servers based on AMD Opteron™ processors.
“When we compared all the evaluation variables, we concluded that AMD Opteron processor-based Sun Fire V20z servers were the optimal solution to help us meet our needs,” said Kedzierski. And because the company had previously relied on Sun servers, “Selecting Sun Fire V20z servers based on AMD technology provided us the additional advantage of continuing to use Sun products, which made the migration even easier,” Kedzierski continued.
The company uses the AMD Opteron processor-based Sun systems for Web operations as well as testing and development. Servers dedicated to static Web operations run on Apache 2/Fedora, optimized for AMD64 technology, and are dedicated to handle static content, steady images, objects and format. Additional servers dedicated to dynamic Web operations are used for dynamic contents, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux® for i386 in 32 bits.
Grupo Clarín’s servers currently run 32-bit applications, but thanks to the advantages of the AMD Opteron processor with Direct Connect Architecture, the company is ready to migrate to 64-bit applications when the time is right for the company to migrate. “The 32- and 64-bit compatibility was a critical factor in our decision, as we expect to continue to grow and therefore needed a solution that can easily scale,” said Kedzierski.
Impact
Grupo Clarín’s Kedzierski considers the improved customer experience to be the greatest asset provided by the new, high-performing Sun Fire V20z servers running on the AMD Opteron processor. The company is committed to ensuring that its users will not experience any kind of access problem, and today, “Even when important news or major sports events impact our readers and drive increased traffic to our Web sties, we see no loss in performance. This is critically important to the experience we deliver to our users,” said Kedzierski.
“We considered scalability to be one of the most important factors when making an investment such as the one we did in these systems. Our team has been so pleased with the performance gains of the Sun Fire V20z servers running on the AMD Opteron processor that we plan to present our operations results to other organizations within Grupo Clarín,” added Kedzierski.
According to Grupo Clarín, in extreme situations – when there is a dramatic increase in the number of visits to the site due to important news – the servers’ performance never decreases. Based on these results, the company believes the new servers could handle twice the volume of traffic they now receive at critical times, and as much as three times the traffic at normal times – allowing for the growth that the company anticipates.
Quote
“Even when important news or major sports events impact our readers and drive increased traffic to our Web sites, we see no loss in performance. This is critically important to the experience we deliver to our users.” - Juan Kedzierski, chief information officer, Grupo Clarín
About AMD
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