Sky News improves data centre scalability with Red Hat solution

Upgraded IT infrastructure allows multimedia news provider to provide content at a faster rate

Sky News, the 24-hour rolling news channel, has increased the scalability and resilience of its data centre operations with the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation and Red Hat Satellite solutions.

The pressures of delivering 24-7 news coverage across a number of multimedia platforms had started to put a strain on Sky News' IT infrastructure. The channel therefore took the decision to upgrade its systems in order to cope with the demands of providing television, radio and online news content for 365 days a year.

In order to deliver the best service possible, Sky News opted to virtualise its servers, allowing for increased scalability and resilience in order to quickly deliver news across all its platforms, whenever that may be. The Red Hat platform was deployed in 2012 and according to James Murphy, technology delivery manager for Sky News, the results have been highly successful.

"Our speed of change used to be measured in months. Since deploying Red Hat solutions, it's measured in weeks and even days - making us more responsive, not just to breaking new stories and world events, but to changes in market and audience demands, too," he said.

"Working with Red Hat really was a true partnership. The amount of help and support we received from Red Hat gave us the confidence to move forward with our virtualisation project - even though it was different from most other companies' approaches," Murphy added.

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of Virtualisation and OpenStack at Red Hat: "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation offers a no-compromise virtualisation solution with industry-leading performance coupled with a compelling ROI.

"We are pleased to work with Sky News and combine the functionality of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation and Red Hat Satellite to power an infrastructure designed to meet their growing needs."