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

Why the Move to Thin Clients

A few years ago, the Daily News implemented 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®.

The process of printing a daily newspaper leaves very little room for downtime. 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 total cost of ownership.

Reliability an Absolute Requirement

There are currently 12 Thin Clients throughout the printing plant. These clients display production information that is critical to managing the daily newspaper operation. Data are stored in an MS SQL database; ASP.NET and Crystal Reports applications 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 that serve 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 with either minimal or no production downtime.

If a Thin Client fails, preconfigured spares are 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 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.

"Production Systems Engineering has configured a redundant architecture and we are able to recover from a state of failure either with minimal or no production downtime," says Ray Lozano, production systems director, New York Daily News.

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.