JSTOR has the dual mission of archiving scholarly literature and dramatically improving access to this archived material. The archive piece of the mission demands a technology infrastructure that is robust and reliable. The access portion of the mission demands delivery systems that are available around the clock to meet the ever-increasing usage needs from scholars around the world. By establishing three mirror sites (University of Michigan, Princeton University, and University of Manchester in the U.K.), JSTOR has been able to deliver excellent uptime since the archive was made available in 1997.

As the expectation of service availability grows, however, we need to consider alternatives to our current data center solutions. This was never clearer than in August 2003 when virtually the entire northeast U.S. experienced a power blackout due to a partial failure in the national power grid. The JSTOR archive remained available during that blackout, but it was clear that good fortune had played a significant role. While we expect that our community has tolerance for downtime in the case of such a widespread and extreme emergency, we know that there are commercial standard data center alternatives that could offer us broader coverage.

The key elements we were looking for in a new data center:

Stability — we wanted to work with an organization whose primary mission was to guarantee network availability and was located in a primary telecommunications hub in the U.S.;

Reliability — we wanted to find a data center that was west of the Mississippi River (on a different power grid than the east coast of the U.S.) and that had backup diesel-powered generators should electricity be unavailable;

Capacity — it was important to find a location that had available space capacity to handle JSTOR's expected growth, a center that had significant Internet bandwidth, and a nearby connection to Abilene (the Internet2 academic network backbone which handles 75% of JSTOR traffic).

We first identified an organization to provide us with the robust network services that JSTOR requires. The Front Range GigaPOP (FRGP), located just outside Denver, CO, is a consortium of universities, non-profit corporations, and government agencies that cooperate in an aggregation point in order to share Wide Area Networking (WAN) services, access to the commodity Internet, access to the Abilene (Internet2) research network, and access to the National LambdaRail (NLR). Ithaka, on behalf of JSTOR and ARTstor, has joined the FRGP, one of several gigapops in the United States. This has turned out to be a wonderful relationship for Ithaka and JSTOR, having the opportunity to work with people who have similar not-for-profit and very service-oriented attitudes.

FRGP runs its service out of a commercial installation in downtown Denver, managed by Level(3) Communications, Inc. Level(3) also rents out data center space in the same building to organizations looking for a highly available, stable professional data center with superior networking. There are over one million modems in this location alone, as well as several megawatts of electrical power generation capability. It also has diesel-powered backup generators.

While the planning for the move of the JSTOR public servers from the University of Michigan to Level(3) took months, the actual move itself was accomplished over the Labor Day holiday weekend in September. We took the JSTOR public servers in Michigan offline on a Thursday afternoon, packed them up, put them on separate trucks, and drove them non-stop to Denver. The 1,224 mile trip took just over twenty hours.

Sun Microsystems was hired to assist with the move, and their engineers showed up in Denver on Friday night. By Sunday afternoon, the servers were turned over to our Technology Services staff for tuning and quality assurance. After a few final checks and changes, we flipped the switch that made the servers "live" on Sunday evening.

While we are pleased to now have a commercial-standard datacenter west of the Mississippi River, it is important to note that we are not turning away from our university relationships. We will continue to host mirror sites at Princeton University and the University of Manchester. Our relationship with the University of Michigan remains strong, and we will continue discussions with them on partnering to ensure we meet our long-term archiving responsibilities.

But, for the time being, we feel like we've made significant progress toward guaranteeing a robust and reliable archive that can serve our participating publishers, libraries, faculty, and students well over the next several years.

Last updated on September 8, 2006