SEATTLE TIMES CLASSIFIED DEPARTMENT AVERTS POTENTIAL DISASTER

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SEATTLE TIMES CLASSIFIED DEPARTMENT AVERTS POTENTIAL DISASTER

(Source: Joe McGarvey, THE SEATTLE TIMES, 3/1/1999)

In 1997, a team of engineers from software manufacturer ATEX MEDIA SOLUTIONS INC. discovered that the 25-year-old mainframe which runs the classified advertising system for THE SEATTLE TIMES, was likely to quit working at the end of the millennium. To compound problems, they also found that extensive customization to the original system made it impossible to fix the Y2K bugs. This ominous news meant the entire mainframe, which also hosted the paper's billing, accounting and prepress systems, would have to be replaced. Given that classified ads generate approximately half of the paper's revenue, Kurt Dahl, Vice President of Information Technology, realized that he needed to move quickly and chose PWI TECHNOLOGIES, the company which helped the Times launch its website in 1995, to deliver a solution. PWI replaced the newspaper's DIGITAL mainframe with a new SUN E10000 server that is Y2K-compliant, capable of supporting an upgraded version of the Atex editing program, houses 22 UltraSPARC processors, 18 GB of RAM and .75 TB of storage, and will support multiple databases and systems that will be used to create a data warehouse. Although the new system has now been in place at the paper since the beginning of the year, "it will take us well into 2000 to transfer all the systems," says Dahl. (JG)

Link: http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?VAR19990301S0022

-- Bill (billdale@lakesnet.net), May 18, 1999


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