Sky News streamlines content delivery with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Satellite

Sky News, BSkyB’s 24-hour, multimedia news channel, has increased the scalability and resiliency of their centralized platform operations by deploying Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Satellite in two data centers.

Sky News’ television platform alone reaches an audience of 107 million viewers in 118 countries. Renowned for the speed of its coverage and flexibility of reporting news live, the Sky News team decided to upgrade their IT infrastructure to deliver news consistently and quickly across multiple platforms. Broadcasting, publishing and real-time news had originally been delivered from a centralized platform, Sky News team decided to upgrade their IT infrastructure to deliver news consistently and quickly across multiple platforms, rebuilding the system as a virtualized environment that would enable better scalability, flexibility and resiliency for IT administrators and users. In May 2012, Sky News deployed Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to run across two of their data centers, paired with Red Hat Satellite for systems management.

While rebuilding the platform, James Murphy, technology delivery manager for Sky News, and his team opted to run the two virtualized data centers in a “back to back” setup, sharing workloads equally across two data centers. This setup would allow for enough free capacity to handle traffic peaks on the website and simultaneously satisfy disaster recovery requirements. The Red Hat team built a prototype of the “back to back” architecture Sky News was looking for, enabling them to thoroughly test the new concept before deployment. The management capabilities from Red Hat Satellite also enabled Sky News to move efforts previously used on manual tasks to new efforts, as the management platform automated former routine system administrations work.

The new virtualized environment for Sky News’ content publishing system has enabled Sky News to devote more time to ensuring that the system grows and evolves, just as Sky News’ audiences and services are growing and evolving. With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Satellite, Sky News’ team can launch new virtual machines to take advantage of new opportunities in the market with confidence that they can manage increasing website traffic.