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Home >> Success Stories >> Sports Illustrated for Kids Success Stories
FlashDisk Scores a Home Run with Sports Illustrated for Kids The Organization -- www.sikids.com Snowboarding. Soccer. Wrestling. Each month, Sports Illustrated for Kids, based in New York City, provides the colorful excitement of sports to more than a million boys and girls ages seven to 14. The recipient of more than 25 Parent's Choice Magazine awards, Sports Illustrated for Kids entertains, educates, and inspires young fans with editorial focusing on professional athletes to disabled athletes. The magazine engages youthful readers with profiles, puzzles, playing tips, sports cards, posters, and stories featuring readers' drawings and writing. With more than 10 million page views per week, SIKIDS.com, a supplement to the print publication, ranks as one of the most popular kids' sites on the Web. FlashDisk Customer Profile as Told By Sports Illustrated for Kids "The servers that make up the editorial network computing system handle the entire electronic copyflow of both print and online content. The system supports the entire editorial operation, including the art department to the fact checkers, as well as acts as repositories for other departments. For example, an online department uses these servers as a temporary storage place for pages to be placed on SIKIDS.com. The photo department also uses the servers for storing scanned photos and their captions. Until mid-1999, our editorial system consisted of Apple Workgroup 8550 servers running very slowly at 132 MHz. The servers were attached to a Conley disk array, which had served us well over the years. Given the evolution of technology, we found that our systems lagged in throughput, and, equally important, provided limited storage capacity. In our normal copyflow process, certain folders fill up and need to be cleaned out as files get archived onto CD ROM. Because of a scarcity of storage space, this disk maintenance cleanup turned into a daily scheduled routine. We continually had to check for full volumes and then delete files in order to free up space. If we had let the data sit there too long, we would've experienced a server crash. In September 1999, we updated our editorial server completely, sticking with the Apple platform. We bought two Apple G4 file servers and upgraded the workstations in the art department and photo department to Apple G4s and G3s. These folks needed more horsepower as a result of working with PhotoShop. We plan to have mostly Apple G3s, G4s, and some PowerMacs. When it came to a storage system for the two Apple servers, we didn't have to think twice about purchasing a Winchester Systems' FlashDisk OpenRAID storage array. I 'd been aware of Winchester Systems' reputation for providing a fast and reliable storage system, as well supporting multiple servers and all open operating systems. In fact, the folks at one of our sister publications, Time Magazine, raved about the FlashDisk's performance. Our performance as a result of the FlashDisk storage system has increased significantly. I took some benchmarks before and after we installed the FlashDisk. Our reads turned out to be three times faster than before, and the writes about twice as fast. When we first got the FlashDisk, we had it installed in a data center in a nearby older building. The writes had to go through several hops on the network. Now they we're in a new building and don't have any hop constraints on the TCP/IP ethernet network, the FlashDisk's speed for writes has dramatically increased. FlashDisk provides us with RAID 5 storage shared between these Apple servers. The storage is broken down into five separate volumes configured for the various file sizes needed by each department using the FlashDisk. Because we've a vast amount of storage, we don't have to worry about excess volumes filling up. We've said goodbye to daily housekeeping tasks, too. However, we do monitor storage space regularly. Our manual routine still consists of storing the contents of each issue into certain folders and knowing exactly when to archive what. We now allow several months' worth of contents to accumulate in these folders. To this end, employees have back issues more readily available to them than on a CD. Although we still archive to CD and then delete the archived files from the FlashDisk, we don't have to go through this procedure as often as before. As an added benefit, Winchester Systems sold us a DLT drive, which we use for backing up our FlashDisk. The DLT provides us with a reliable system, which doesn't need to be stocked with tapes every day. Before the DLT, we had a DAT autoloader. We had to keep rotating the seven tapes the device held. We also needed to write a script for each night's backup. If the drive broke, which it did frequently, I had to take it apart, take out the tapes, and clean them. Like the FlashDisk, the DLT drive has improved the speed of our backups and provided us with more storage capacity than we had before."
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