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EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009software and hardware, for planning and deployment. EDINA continues to gain from its position inside theUniversity of Edinburgh, and its compatibility with the University’s ICT strategy.There is now agreement with JISC for a recurrent hardware-funding model and funding is now in place for theperiod 2008-2011 from the JISC Capital Programme.In 2008-2009, Sun Fujitsu Sparc 64 servers were purchased to replace the existing Sun Enterprise servers thatwere purchased in 2003. The migration of Digimap to new hardware has largely been completed and migrationof Bibliographic/Multimedia services is ongoing. This hardware replacement has resulted in significantperformance gains and increased resilience. Annual maintenance costs have also been reduced. Further capitalspend to improve resilience is scheduled in the coming year.The University of Edinburgh has established a twin-site configuration for backup, with a second machine roomsituated at a remote site several miles distant. EDINA has bought a fixed number of ‘slots’ in the new SANbasedbackup infrastructure purchased by the University, and the necessity for operator intervention has beenremoved. Future additions to backup capacity can be made when necessary by buying additional ‘slots’ in theUniversity’s infrastructure.JISC have also funded a separate EDINA development environment. This is being used along with Solariscontainer technology to cleanly separate development and service activity. This approach was used successfullyfor recent service development and also for the Digimap annual data load.There has also been a move over the year to adopt virtualisation under VMWare, principally to support non-Solaris operating systems. This has currently been utilised for development and local EDINA projects butshould become a fully supported enterprise environment next year.Over the last year, EDINA has improved resilience by converting and upgrading all of its servers to dual Gigabitconnections configured for automatic failover. An extra Gigabit network switch has also been deployed so thatnetwork connections are dual-pathed.In common with the University’s Information Services group, EDINA is utilising the ITIL IT ServiceManagement framework to ensure that it improves its IT services in line with best practice processes. Severalstaff members have attended University-arranged courses.In 2008-2009, EDINA has been reviewing software systems used across the data centre, with a view to ensuringefficient and effective use of software. EDINA will continue to monitor open source solutions and offeringsfrom commercial software vendors to ensure that the most effective options are deployed in EDINA services.As web services are increasingly being supported by desktop tools, there is an increasing requirement to provideexisting services via a combination of current and new access routes. EDINA plans to provide support forproduction web services. Its hardware and software infrastructure will need to be able to accommodate thecorresponding growth in demand.For internal services, flexibility and ease of maintenance are primary considerations. In 2008-2009, the EDINAhelpdesk/licence maintenance system Helios was re-implemented in a Windows VM environment, replacingCGI scripts by Cold Fusion as the application server, with Microsoft’s SQL-Server replacing Ingres for thedatabase. EDINA also recruited a small-systems support officer, to provide technical support to staff.Ensure EDINA’s long-term sustainabilityEDINA produces three-year rolling Strategies. In 2008-2009, the Strategy for 2009-2012 was made available atthe website 12 and work was undertaken to produce the Strategy for 2010-2013, which was published in Autumn2009. Noting the gap between high-level strategic planning and annual operational planning, EDINA also12 http://edina.ac.uk/about/docs.html23