LIAS.... Under the Hood

By Sylvia MacKinnon

Although LIAS (Library Information Access System) is one of the most visible computer applications at Penn State, one doesn't hear much about systems and servers that reside behind the scenes to keep this critical part of the University's computing landscape going. LIAS has been a familiar acronym at Penn State since 1983, when the online catalog was introduced. Earlier still … in the mid-1970s … a Xerox Sigma 9 computer capable of handling 20 concurrent users was installed in Pattee Library; this was the platform upon which LIAS initially grew. Needless to say, LIAS has come a long way and its infrastructure has gone through much iteration since "the old days" of the Xerox Sigma 9. Today's LIAS infrastructure supports a web-based catalog of 2.9+ million titles (4.9 million volumes), hundreds of databases, e-journals, e-books, automatic linking to full text for articles, electronic reserves, automated circulation and staff services, as well as ancillary services such as email, and more.

At the University Libraries Technology Update in fall 2005, Tun Chin and Mark Saussure, members of Digital Library Technologies (DLT), the ITS unit that supports the University Libraries, discussed upcoming platform migration planned for the LIAS infrastructure. Their comments are summarized below.

The last major shift in the LIAS infrastructure occurred in 1999. At that time, LIAS was migrated from Compaq VMS to Compaq Tru64 UNIX, Oracle 8.1.7 was installed to perform database operations, three separate UNIX servers were added, and all of this was placed on new hardware, Compaq ALPHA GS160. While the migration took place, it was business as usual for users of Penn State Libraries, with the current version of LIAS continuing to run without interruption on the VMS production machine. Although there have been a number of upgrades since 1999, the various components have essentially remained stable. The LIAS platform as it existed in fall 2005 is shown below.

Why Migrate … Again?

"End of Life" announcements were received for both HP Alpha and Tru64, and maintenance costs for Alpha servers have been increasing. To further compound the problems, Sirsi Unicorn, the commercial software on which many LIAS applications run, has only one customer in addition to Penn State running Alpha, True64 and Oracle. The result, of course, is that Sirsi releases for this platform generally lag behind releases for other platforms. Sirsi's platform of choice for development is Sun servers running Solaris.

So although the task of migration of a complicated system such as LIAS is very difficult, the decision to migrate was actually an easy one. In order to keep LIAS state of the art, to enable it to truly respond to the ever-increasing needs of Penn State Libraries, its underpinnings had to be top notch. And that meant "migration."

Members of DLT spent much of 2005 planning for and implementing the new platform to which LIAS was to be migrated. In May, system design was completed and an order placed for a Sun server, with 16 dual core SPARC processors. Since each processor had two cores, the result was 32 processors, able to be sliced to suit appropriate needs. The hardware arrived in July, and installation and testing began. In September, a copy of the production Unicorn database was installed. In October, support for conversion of all applications began. Beginning in November, DLT and the University Libraries staff began extensive testing and re-testing, including timing tests for index rebuilding.

The initial intent was to migrate to the Solaris operating system and Sun servers by the end December 2005, during the holiday break. However, enough problems were encountered during fall testing to warrant rescheduling the final phases of migration to spring break 2006. The CAT (online catalog) was placed in read-only mode during a two day period of conversion. In addition to The CAT, other library services were also in the process of being migrated to Solaris: web services, Libraries mail and Webmail, Libraries employee directory and mailing lists.

Additional changes will take place in upcoming months, including migration to Oracle 10g, as well as to the most current version of Sirsi Unicorn.

Final Thoughts

While it is a massive job to migrate an entity as large as LIAS from one system to another, it can be done. The goals remain the same as in the migration of 1999: provide a clean migration with no interruption of services to the user. In addition to the server platform change, an additional 42 terabytes of disk storage has been added, enough to support existing applications and provide additional storage for the Libraries’ expanding role in scholarly publishing, repositories and archiving. The hard work of migration will pay off handily.