Chosun.com Achieves Scalability for Its Website with Red Hat Solutions

FAST FACTS

Industry: Technology

Geography: Headquartered in Seoul, Korea

Challenge: Replace former centralized system with a flexible and affordable solution that enables the ability to scale with website traffic spikes

Migration Path: Sun servers and EMC storage to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell PowerEdge servers

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle databases

Hardware: Dell PowerEdge servers

Benefits: Experienced reduced costs, enhanced performance, and greatly expanded scalability that enables easy deployment of additional servers to handle heightened website capacity

“We’ve really benefited from our new Linux-based system – the solution is less expensive, but displays the same high levels of performance. We have added more effort around IT management, but we’re also able to provide more quality services to our users with the enhanced speed and scalability that we now have access to.” — Pyon Dae-bum, Deputy Manager at Chosun.com

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Background
Chosun.com is the online version of Korea’s widest-reaching newspaper that reports worldwide news to local citizens. Recently, Chosun.com renewed its main website and began providing blog services to online members. It also opened a 100-word comment section to enable a more interactive site for readers.

Challenge
Chosun.com’s priority is to maintain IT system stability in order to provide continuous, uninterrupted services on its website 24 hours per day so that published news reaches its readers promptly and accurately.

“We formerly deployed a centralized system with Sun’s UNIX server and EMC storage that was focused on stability, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to satisfy unpredictable system capacity with a centralized server system, so it was hardly possible to provide flexible services,” said Pyon Dae-bum, Deputy Manager at Chosun.com.

To address these issues, Chosun.com reorganized its former centralized system deployed with UNIX servers into IA server clustering based on a dispersed server system. This solution needed to guarantee not only expanded stability, but also compelling opportunities for cost, performance, flexibility, and scalability benefits.

Solution
Because Chosun.com’s online services, like its 100-word comment section, experience waves of heavy traffic, the system needed to be configured to appropriately scale with demand. To address this, Chosun.com built its system with several 2-way or lower-level servers in order to provide flawless services to users.

After assessing varied solutions, Chosun.com decided to implement its dispersed cluster system with Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell’s Intel Processor-based IA servers, and Oracle DB Clustering solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux was selected for its performance and cost-effectiveness, while Dell hardware was chosen for its stability.

“We felt that the stability of multiple IA servers would provide greater benefits than that offered by the single UNIX server that we were leveraging before,” said Dae-bum. “We were able to deploy a more flexible and stable system with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Dell hardware in a clustering environment.”

Benefits
After migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Dell solutions to form an IA server system, Chosun.com was presented with many advantages, including reduced costs, system scalability, and heightened performance. The solution offers a dispersed system environment and allows for enhanced scalability when building additional systems. Now, Chosun.com can deploy additional servers according to increases in traffic with ease of implementation due to the system’s parallel formation.

“We’ve really benefited from our new Linux-based system – the solution is less expensive, but displays the same high levels of performance. We have added more effort around IT management, but we’re also able to provide more quality services to our users with the enhanced speed and scalability that we now have access to,” said Dae-bum.

Because of the affordability and scalability of its new system, Chosun.com plans to incorporate more user-friendly services on its website. It plans to migrate its servers used for advertisements, log analysis, and other internal tasks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well. “There is a great possibility that we’ll consider migrating more and more of our foundational systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux soon,” said Dae-bum.