News Limited phases out Solaris

Publisher News Limited has decided to cut down the number of its server operating systems from four to three, with Solaris drawing the short straw.

"We won't use Solaris moving forward," News Limited chief technology officer Tom Quinn told ZDNet.com.au. The company will continue to use Windows, Linux and IBM's AIX.

The big sucking sound in the corner has been FatWire. It's taken all our resources for the last 12 months.

News Ltd CTO Tom Quinn

The company's "young tech wizards" had done an analysis, Quinn said. At the start, they hadn't been sure about Sun's future, although since then it had been bought by Oracle, so Quinn thought the company would probably survive. In the end, however, the team believed that Linux was more what the company needed. "We didn't want to have four," Quinn said.

The company's old Vignette web content system had been running on Solaris. Now it has decided to migrate to FatWire instead, which will be run on Linux.

"We went live with FatWire on The Daily Telegraph last week," Quinn said. The next phase will see sites such as The Australian, The Herald, The Sun, The Courier-Mail, News.com.au and Fox Sports moved onto the new platform. After that, the next layer down such as TrueLocal, Carsguide and moshtix would be migrated.

"News Digital Media's had rapid growth over the last few years," Quinn said. "We didn't have platforms which would be able to take us into the future." Considering that fact, he went to market for a new system. "It got down to a shoot out between FatWire and Vignette's latest Java version," Quinn said.

FatWire won due to its features, he said, which included the ability to do lots of video and user-generated content as well as a speedy route to publish with less clicks. New sites could also be built quickly.

Apart from FatWire, Quinn's team hadn't had many other projects on its plate, he said. "The big sucking sound in the corner has been FatWire. It's taken all our resources for the last 12 months."

Before FatWire, the CTO had been doing a lot of work to solve capacity issues that had surfaced when Steve Irwin died in 2007 "and every site in the country went down". The News Limited sites did 21 million page impressions a day, he said.

Since the work, including buying hardware and taking out redundant code, it's been much better, he said. During the Victorian bushfires there were 41 million page impressions a day, which the system coped with.