The “A Tarde” Group from Bahia, founded in 1912, is composed of some of the main media outlets in the Northeast of Brazil: daily newspaper, FM radio, printing services, news portal and Internet service provider.

The Project

The Group promoted a modernization of its technological park to sustain its leadership in the state and in the area. It invested R$ 6OO thousand and exchanged 12 servers, besides the construction of a new application for the portal. The necessity was determined from the number of recorded interruptions of the portal. The “A Tarde” Online portal recorded approximately 7 million page views a month two years ago – with a tendency of increasing more. The diagnosis was the first step of the project, to which several suppliers in the market were invited. Cimcorp was the company that presented the best cost-benefit in order to implement the best solution.

The IT management verified that the updating and standardization of the park would be fundamental for the evolution of the group. Besides the heterogeneity – in brands and machines – the performance and reliability of the environment had to be improved. The display of data, overly decentralized, cause excessive redundancy of operations and forced the team to monitor the servers during at least 90% of their workday.

Thus, began the project, which had the objective of stabilizing the system as well as standardizing the equipment in order to centralize the information, optimize data storage and improve user service. The first step was the installation of a Dell 12-server rack, which centralized the access provider and a part of the newspaper’s content. Next, with the arrival of EMC’s storage equipment with 15 disks, the data was groups in a centralized manner.

The challenge of on-the-fly migration, without interrupting the operations, was overcome and, after the conclusion of the project, the company has celebrated the results. The stability of the portal, previously at 95%, is now averaging 99,5%.

"The IT professionals were practically dedicated to putting out fires: The productivity of the technology area grew exponentially. If before the professionals were forced to dedicate most of their working hours to the maintenance of servers, now this time has been reduced to 10% - 15%." Marcelo Barreiro, IT Manager of the “A Tarde” Group

"Nowadays, practically all interruptions are programmed ", says Barreiro. "Now we can rely on our servers. A redundant structure was created, which perfectly services the system without the risk of data loss.”