(Don't) Stop the Presses
Thin Clients the solution when downtime is not an option

Known as "New York's Hometown Newspaper", The New York Daily News began printing in 1919 and soon became a favorite for is use of photographs, as well as its news, gossip and sports section. Its daily circulation of over 800,000 makes it the 7th most popular paper in the country and the second most widely read of New York's 10 papers.

Some of its more famous headlines: "Who's a Bum" (describing the Brooklyn Dodgers championship of 1955) and "Ford to City: Drop Dead", run when President Gerald Ford refused the City of New York assistance during its financial crisis of the 1970's.

Why the move to Thin Clients

The Daily News was in the process of implementing a Production Management Information System. During the project specifications, their Production Systems Engineering team worked closely with vendors to identify a state-of-the art solution with high system availability and centralized system administration. What they found was the Thin Client solution offered by ACP's ThinManager.

There is very little room for downtime when printing a daily newspaper. Thin Clients from ACP offered the most reliable system, with simple failure recovery methods if needed. And as a bonus it was obvious that the new system would also reduce their TCO.

Reliability an absolute requirement

There are currently twelve Thin Clients throughout the printing plant. These clients display critical production information which is used to manage daily newspaper operation. The data are stored in an MS SQL database and utilize ASP.NET and Crystal Reports applications to generate production management reports which are critical for analysis and maintenance of the equipment.

Because of the extreme necessity to minimize downtime, the Daily News' current configuration consists of 12 clients “online” and 2 clients serving as “offline-spares”. Add to that two servers and ACP's redundancy, and their Production Systems Engineering department has produced a redundant architecture that allows them to recover from a state of failure either with minimal or no production downtime.

If a Thin Client fails they have preconfigured spares available for immediate swap-out. Because ThinManager keeps the Thin Client configuration on the servers, a failed client simply needs to be replaced with an off the shelf unit and it will boot with the same configuration as the failed unit. If the primary server fails the second server will host all thin client transactions.

Thin Client benefits

The project was begun in September of 2001, and all of the clients were installed by February of 2002.

The biggest benefits that the Daily News has seen from their move to Thin Client technology? They would answer the question as follows:

• Reduction of incurred downtime due to a system problem with distributed PCs
  
• Elimination of unnecessary PC setup
  
• More effective management and maintenance of the system from a central server location.
  
• Less money spent on client hardware
  
• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership

The redundancy features built into ThinManager coupled with the simple configuration and drop in replacement capability of ThinManager ready Thin Clients ensure that each issue of the New York Daily News arrives on time.

About ACP ThinManager®
ACP's ThinManager® is an enhancement to the basic Windows® Terminal Server operating systems such as Windows® 2000 and 2003 Server. The features added by ThinManager® focus on the industrial market, allowing users to replace the PCs they are now using on the factory floor with inexpensive “Windows terminals” that are much easier (and less expensive) to maintain. While any Thin Client will allow multiple instances of existing Windows® software to run on a single PC (the Terminal Server) only ACP Enabled Thin Clients running under ThinManager® provide the functionality, redundancy and I/O required in industrial installations.