Operational concept and technical documentation
Gesis' Information Processes in the Social Sciences Department in Bonn is responsible on a permanent basis for the technical administration and maintenance of the server. If you have any questions concerning the technical infrastructure, Philipp Schaer (philipp.schaer(at)gesis(dot)org) and Marcus Schommler (marcus.schommler(at)gesis(dot)org) will be happy to help you. GESIS' Specialised Information for the Social Sciences Department in Bonn is responsible for the content management side. Monika Zimmer (monika.zimmer(at)gesis(dot)org) and Uta Richter (uta.richter(at)gesis(dot)org) will be happy to answer any indexing-related questions you may have.
The repository was set up in 2007. It runs on a VMware virtual machine and a dedicated application server (IBM xSeries running Tomcat). The servers are located in the GESIS server room in Lennéstrasse 30 in Bonn. The server room remains locked at all times and only administrators have access to it.
Hardware
At present, the virtual server has 2 GB of RAM and disk space of 20 GB allocated. The application server is an IBM xSERIES 335 with 2 CPU cores (2x Xeon 3 GHz), 3 GB of RAM and 40 GB of disk space.
Software
The operating system Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 1 is installed on both systems. On the virtual machine, we run Apache 2.2 with PHP 5 and a MySQL 5 database supplied by Typo3 4.2. On the application server, we run the repository software DBClear on Tomcat 5.5. Tomcat 5.5 administers a Postgres database. Hence, the repository and editorial software and hardware are kept separate.
Access to the systems is protected by means of a personal identification system. Access to the remote consoles of the Windows systems is limited to members of the GESIS network and is further protected via personal IDs.
Back up and maintenance of the system
The server systems are backed up twice a day by a Shadow Copy Volume service. In addition, all full texts and metadata are backed up each night on another file server. Software updates (Windows updates, security patches etc) are applied on a regular basis. If the system breaks down, it can be reconstructed within a day with standard software and a restore of the backed-up data.
In addition to the maintenance of the hardware and the standard software by the IT Department, the repository software DBClear is maintained by the GESIS DBClear Team of which Philipp Schaer is also a member.
Philipp Schaer, 05 May 2009
