The UK’s largest news publisher, Trinity Mirror, has turned to NetApp to ensure readers get the latest news and the best user experience by harnessing the hybrid cloud. With more than 150 print and 80 online publications, including the Daily Mirror, the publisher wanted to ensure its content updates remain real-time by moving its disaster recovery to the hybrid cloud.
Having embraced the hybrid cloud over the last ten years, Trinity Mirror seized the opportunity to break its infrastructure refresh cycle when the lease came to an end on its secondary disaster recovery facility, onsite at the London HQ. The team turned to NetApp to leverage the hybrid cloud for disaster recovery (DR), having utilised NetApp’s expertise several years previously, in its quest to centralise a siloed editorial and advertising system. Applying NetApp ONTAP Cloud for AWS, Trinity Mirror built a reliable disaster recovery platform for the company’s largest business-critical applications in the Amazon Cloud.
· Keeping it real-time with disaster recovery
Multiple refreshes of online content throughout the day and various newspaper prints going to press every day, means up-to-the minute reportage is the bread and butter of Trinity Mirror. Downtime is simply unthinkable as this could devastate the business, with loss of readers, investors and advertisers. However, with NetApp’s ONTAP Cloud, no matter the scale of a potential incident threatening Trinity Mirror’s rolling updates data can be recovered instantaneously with less than ten minutes of data loss – well below its 60-minute benchmark. Now, there’s no reason for anyone to miss a beat.
· An economical hybrid cloud solution
By breaking its refresh cycle and moving Disaster Recovery into the hybrid cloud, Trinity Mirror eliminates the need for large capital expenditures and recurring migration costs. Meanwhile, ONTAP Cloud’s ‘pilot-mode’ assumes an on-demand cost structure, so while the software is idle in the cloud it is not paid for until the service is needed.
· Bridging traditional and digital media by breaking down data siloes
Digital transformation has been pivotal to Trinity Mirror’s success. Built upon its ever growing data, the publisher has embraced a hybrid cloud approach in order to facilitate the explosive growth in video and image content. Ensuring efficiencies across both print and digital operations is essential and has been achieved by breaking down data siloes using a centralised content management system and pushing content from print to the web.
Martin Warren, NetApp EMEA Cloud Solutions Marketing Manager comments: “Trinity Mirror is an exemplar of the power to be unleashed by digital transformation. With readers increasingly leaning on real-time updates from its print and digital publications every day and in the midst of important news events, its hybrid cloud approach ensures risks of down-time are minimised – and the show will go on. In a world increasingly reliant on always-on services like rolling news services, there is no room for error when it comes to optimising services with instantly accessible Disaster Recovery.”
Peter Raettig, Trinity Mirror, Head of Technical Operations adds: “Trinity Mirror reaches 38.6 million people each month, who expect 24/7 coverage of the latest news. In an era when many traditional media outlets are struggling to keep pace with changing information consumption behaviour, it is essential for brands to modernise. NetApp has been a key advisor to us in developing and expanding our hybrid cloud strategy to optimise our business. We are looking at decommissioning our primary data centre and moving it completely to the cloud, and we see NetApp as a core part of that.”
