Core Services Goals for 2006-2007

Goals for the current planning year

Goals for previous years

Highlights

New areas of work. This year, we will be putting huge investments in storage to work, including a new SAN for Mirlyn and related services and a new SAN for the MDP project; these new systems will position us to scale our storage into the petabyte range. Systems that have developed for high-volume processing of materials from Google will be extended to local workflows, and new systems for providing usage statistics and managing access control, long needing improvement, will be put in place. We aim to reduce the overhead of some of the day-to-day work in Core Services by enjoying the reduced complexity in these systems, as well as by standardizing and automating some administration processes and improving off-site management infrastructure.

Maintenance of existing services. As always, we will keep pace with production and development server replacements, and along the way aim to incorporate some new technologies for server virtualization to increase performance and availability. Work that is already underway with the DLPS web service infrastructure, CoSign authentication, and Shibboleth will continue to make progress. Core Services and DSS will also continue work on an IT security plan for the library, and will develop processes for IT security incident handling.

Goals are categorized as either hard commitments, obligations, or initiatives, and are grouped by type within each category.

Hard Commitments
  critical projects for the coming year

• Content/Web infrastructure
• Finish migration of DLPS web services to redundant networked storage.
• Replace web load-balancing system.
• Increase scalability of ingest/processing/validation processes with multiple front-end servers and/or SSI clustering.
• Apply automation and processes created for MDP to local Digital Conversion workflows.
• Migrate to new web statistics system.
• Finish transition to CoSign authentication.
• Storage
• Migrate to new Pillar Axiom SAN in ALDC.
• Finish MDP RFP process and design and install sustainable, large-scale storage solution for MDP project.
• System administration
• Finish transition of production services to TSM backup service and upgrade existing backup system for development servers.
• Improve remote access capabilities to server resources using serial console servers, network KVM (for blades), and VPN device(s).
• Replace production and development servers as scheduled.
• Standardize and document system administration processes.
• * Transition to Gigabit Ethernet service in room 10.
• Security
• * Complete security planning and perform TBD high-priority tasks.

Obligations
  very important but less urgent projects for the coming year

• Content/Web infrastructure
• Develop web-based authorization management system.
• Migrate Library Web Services to networked storage.
• Continue work with ITCS on Shibboleth origin pilot.
• Migrate all web service to Apache 2.
• System administration
• Begin to develop centralized system administration mechanisms.
• * Transition to ITCS-supported DHCP.
• Security
• Investigate virtual firewall service and request/implement as appropriate.

Initiatives
  strategic or "wish list" projects that are vulnerable to postponement

• Support integration/rearchitecture/massive scaling of locally-developed content systems (Deep Blue, DLXS, MBooks).
• Delve deeper into SSI clustering and server virtualization; build proof-of-concept for virtual servers on an SSI cluster with an eye toward centralized server resources for sharing among all LIT units.
• * Explore centralized storage for sharing among all LIT units.

* These activities will be coordinated with DSS.