‘CIS-Net powered by FastTrack’ has become more and more critical to key business processes such as international distributions, documentation inquiries and exchange, unidentified performances matching, de-duplication of repertoires and ISWC allocation, cue-sheet exchanges and many more.
In order to sustain the intensive usage, CIS-Net’s infrastructure has progressively grown to keep up with the increasing demand. Today, new challenges ahead of us will require reinforcing this infrastructure even more and one of the answers resides in the utilization of cloud-based infrastructure.
At the Lisbon CIS sessions in February 2013, a taskforce was created to audit the CIS-Net infrastructure in particular as regards volumes, workflows, application architecture and infrastructure topography in general. Critical issues were spotted and, in Kuala Lumpur last September, results and mitigations were presented to the community of technicians. Since changes recommended by the audit have been brought to the infrastructure, there was no major outage and there’s an increased stability of all systems available throughout the network.
With these changes and thanks to the full virtualization of systems, and even though the amount of underlying hardware issues is more or less constant, we notice an improvement in the general uptime due to the lack of “adherence” of the systems to any specific hardware.
During the latest ‘FastTrack Days’ held in Berlin, the next steps were presented and discussed. Over 2014, a cloud migration of all critical CIS-Net components will seamlessly occur without any downtimes and will address remaining weaknesses of the system such as hardware issues, general availability, lack of redundancy on certain components, consistent disaster recovery, hardware obsolescence and costs of resources to support physical infrastructure. The further availability of the common cache system in different regions of the globe will also be facilitated.
At that occasion, FastTrack will also extend its service offering to the community of societies; we will soon propose virtual nodes “as a service” for those societies willing to put up their repertoire on CIS-Net without large hardware investments, or also for Societies already operating a node on CIS-Net that wish to virtualize their node.
Didier Roy, Technical Director
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