A Case Study Content Delivery and Aggregation at A&N Media
An Introduction to A&N Media Associated and Northcliffe Media (A&N Media), the consumer media company of DMGT (Daily Mail and General Trust) plc, is a leading multi-channel media company whose best known brand is the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail commands a circulation of over 2 million and a readership of 4.3 million, and The Mail on Sunday boasts a circulation of just below two million with a readership of some 4.5 million. A&N Media comprises Associated Newspapers, Northcliffe Media and A&N International Media and is one of the largest publishers of national newspapers in the UK. Printed titles include the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, Metro, 7 Days, Travel Mail, Weekend, You and Live, there are also web properties that complement the print versions. The Northcliffe Media print stable contains 113 daily, weekly and free regional newspapers with a reach of 5.8 million readers and hosts more than 180 local and news websites. A&N International Media has grown to 50 print and digital interests across Central and Eastern Europe with some inroads into South America. The current portfolio has a presence in Argentina, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia. Executive Summary A&N Media was incurring substantial charges for a third-party service that enabled secure digital content delivery into their production environment. Typical providers were Getty, Press Association, freelance photographers or premedia houses. With a reduction in telecommunication costs, changes in technology and the ability of other providers to supply the same services at greatly reduced costs to A&N Media, it became clear that this service should be replaced. The challenge was to provide a secure & highly available content upload and delivery service at an acceptable cost. Papermule led a project to provide a new digital content delivery service. Their key to achieving high-availability but at low cost was to link servers and storage for geographically distinct areas, each with only average SLAs. This cloud infrastructure is accessed through an A&N Media-owned domain to upload content via HTTP or FTP and is regularly polled by A&N Media s internal infrastructure. This pulls in content for onward distribution to picture desks within the group or to digital advertising servers. The solution is specified to be extensible and to mitigate denial of service (DOS) attacks. The outcome is a removal of reliance on a single third-party s infrastructure or service while maintaining an open door policy for the delivery of content for varying verticals. The system has suffered no loss of receipt of advertising and editorial content and will provide an 80% reduction in costs over five years. In addition to these goals, the solution had to comply with A&N Media s strategy as expressed by David Henderson, CIO A&N Media in July of 2011. A&N Media has become the first newspaper publisher to commit to not owning any servers or data centers within four years. Also, by 2015 it has pledged to adopt a 'bring your own' computing model for employees. The Business Challenge The yearly maintenance cost of the third-party service that enabled digital image and page content delivery to A&N Media s picture desks, and other internal destinations, stood out as AN Content Delivery Case Study fin US Page 2 of 7 May 2012
poor value when compared to other technology-related services. A&N Media s initial approach was to renegotiate the service to reduce recurring costs, but this was not acceptable to the incumbent service provider. The success of any software-based solution is tightly coupled to service availability. With around 47,000 digital images a day, the A&N Media picture desk would immediately notice any service outage. A typical contract to supply external hosting usually limits liability to the cost of the service. Merely crediting the unit cost of a lost server-day would just not be acceptable to an editor who had lost their images for an extended period, so achieving a very high service uptime, without the costs of that level of infrastructure, was the main challenge. A&N Media s next option was to look at utilizing the same solution as other newspaper groups, who were using a hardware-based solution, but extending this approach would have required significant additional hardware to implement across A&N Media. While the costs for this solution were acceptable, the increase in the A&N Media technology estate, along with the accompanying increase in risk and in disaster recovery requirements, did not align to A&N Media s technology strategy. The challenge continued with a third option to look at virtual platforms and the costs required to achieve an acceptable service level. At this point A&N Media approached Papermule to determine if their experience of digital asset management could show the way ahead. The Outcome Papermule proposed and implemented a two-tier solution. The first tier provides secure, resilient and highly available, public-facing web/ftp services and makes use of easily acquired cloud servers. The second tier is behind A&N Media s firewalls and securely pulls public content from the Tier 1 storage to create a collection, aggregation, anti-virus checking, internal file distribution and short-term archive/retrieval system. A copy of the content is made for disaster recovery purposes and the content is then distributed within A&N Media, according to the metadata accompanying the content. The Tier 1 layer of the solution uses freely available servers from Rackspace and Amazon with an adequate but unexceptional 99.95% service uptime commitment. The key to making this a viable alternative is the use of servers in different data centers with both Rackspace and Amazon. Only one server is required to run the service, and because the data is replicated, any one of the servers can be the active server at any given time and location. This leaves three spares. The linking of 4 servers in 4 geographically distinct data centers in this manner provides a service level greater than 99.9999% 1. With the configuration designed for A&N, the system is capable of peak loads of approximately 250,000 files per day and due to the choice of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) as the architecture, our response to the volume can be scaled quickly and inexpensively. The Tier 1 functionality is shown diagrammatically in Figure 1 below. 1 http://www.availabilitydigest.com./public_articles/0101/calculating_availability.pdf AN Content Delivery Case Study fin US Page 3 of 7 May 2012
Figure 1 Tier 1 Functionality To first use the system, a content provider creates an account on anmediasend.co.uk that is held in an LDAP database, replicated across the four data centers. Once the account is created, the new provider can log in to anmediasend.co.uk and content can be uploaded via a webpage (using standard browse or Java drag-and-drop capability) or content can be sent via FTP. This delivery even supports the use of web-enabled camera backs that are currently on the market. In either case the content will be seamlessly routed to the most available data center and stored in Cloudfiles (Rackspace) or S3 Storage (Amazon). While Rackspace and Amazon were the vendors of choice for this solution, it will work equally well with any pair (or more) of IaaS vendors with similar specifications. Tier 2 of A&N Media s content delivery system is a web-based system that routinely polls the Cloudfiles/S3 Storage for new content items and pulls it into a second tier of infrastructure behind a secure firewall. The inbound content is washed through an anti-virus process and distributed based on the instructions in the accompanying metadata, which also allows the content to be tracked. If a picture is used then existing commercial agreements are invoked based on the metadata accompanying the image. The previous solution had a generic login, so there was often no attribution data, which made it difficult or impossible to contact the content provider if a picture was selected for use. The new content is copied to a Disaster Recovery (DR) site every 10 minutes, and then deleted from the original external servers 60 minutes after transfer to internal storage. This timing allows secure back-ups to be made and verified before the original content is removed from the external commercial servers. This is a cost-effective approach, mitigating against the need and cost of an immediate DR copy and limiting the amount of data storage required with Rackspace and Amazon. AN Content Delivery Case Study fin US Page 4 of 7 May 2012
Any form of content is accepted by anmediasend.co.uk, and daily loads normally include.jpg,.png, video files of varying formats,.pdf pages and.pdf print advertisements. The latter are routed to the advertisement management solution to be matched with booked ad space using GWG (Ghent PDF Workgroup) Job Ticket technology to carry the instructions within the PDF. The Tier 2 Functionality is shown in Figure 2 below. Figure 2 Tier 2 Functionality AN Content Delivery Case Study fin US Page 5 of 7 May 2012
Benchmarks As part of the implementation, several key benchmarks were agreed upon: It was important to analyze the pattern of existing content upload to ensure that the new solution was technically capable of meeting daily, weekly and seasonal peaks. The existing system was used by over a thousand registered content providers, all of whom had to be identified, contacted and invited to use the new system. Owning the domain name used for content upload reduces the risk of becoming beholden to one supplier, and will enable a relatively straightforward change of service should it be needed in the future. The solution has been designed to cope seamlessly with the dramatic increases in daily content upload expected during the 2012 Olympics. An 80% cost saving over the 5 years of the business case is seen as realistic. There had to be a very smooth transition to the new service, with no loss of content. As a result of these benchmarks, the system has performed flawlessly since its launch in late 2011. No provider has been without the means to upload digital content to A&N Media publications, and there has been no reported loss of content. Conclusions The success of this project can be attributed to the implementation of a simple to use, universally accessible portal for suppliers of digital content of all levels. The creation of a site that is difficult to use will typically result in not being used. Critical to A&N Media s technology group was a service with virtually no down time, but which complied with the policy of no more servers and data centers at A&N. This meant that the solution had to be designed using the latest web services based technology that will be kept up to date with the ever-changing World Wide Web. For the users within the A&N production sites, it was important that the content be delivered securely, punctually and to the right place. To A&N Media as a corporate entity the solution had to make financial sense, while serving as a conduit to all current and future divisions and titles. Papermule s MediaSentinel Solution delivered on, and continues to deliver, the key performance criteria from all the key stakeholders in the process. AN Content Delivery Case Study fin US Page 6 of 7 May 2012
Testimonials "The CDS project created the opportunity to migrate to an internally controlled cloud-based solution, adding additional functionality and significantly reducing ongoing costs" John Tucker, Operations Director, A&N Media I was visiting the picture desk to update them of our progress, and one of them asked me when we were going to start moving over agencies to the new content delivery system. They were informed that we had already moved them all, they were surprised as there had not been any interruption to the service. Joe Jenkins, Lead Integration Technician, A&N Media Of all our vendors, Papermule are one of the best, if not the best. Peter Ash, Business Relationship Manager, A&N Media UK Office Unit 16/17 Diss Business Centre Diss Norfolk IP21 4HD UK Phone: +44 (0) 1379 650330 www.papermule.com US Office 9801 Fall Creek Road, #128 Indianapolis, IN 46256-4802 USA Phone: +1 317 455 MULE AN Content Delivery Case Study fin US Page 7 of 7 May 2012