Home › Operations › Mirror Site

Mirror Site

Since the PDS went operational in March 1990, the PDS Catalog, its interfaces and all supporting applications have been hosted at a single site, now called the Engineering Node (EN), located at JPL. The deployment in 2002 of PDS-D, the infrastructure that supports electronic distribution of PDS products across the geographically distributed nodes, also has core components which have been installed at the EN. The configuration of these functional components at a single site was identified as a “single point of failure”. If the EN site became inoperable for any reason, several key functional capabilities of the PDS would not be available, including the PDS Catalog, PDS Phone Book, and the PDS-D Query Service.

Hence, the PDS Mirror Site was designed and implemented to provide capability for the online function of the PDS to continue operating at an acceptable level in the event that the EN infrastructure fails catastrophically. This Mirror Site is installed and operational at the University of Maryland where the PDS Small Bodies Node (SBN) resides since July 2006.

Working Group

The Mirror Site effort never really defined an official working group. It has consisted mostly of the EN staff working directly with the SBN staff. Since deployment, automatic monitoring of the Mirror Site occurs daily. In addition, the Mirror Site is being tested on a biannually basis by Alex Leung (EN staff) and Andrew Ducore (SBN staff).

Milestones

Near term milestones include:

Long term milestones include:

  • Mirror Site verification on a bianullay basis

Current Status

The Mirror Site has been running in its standby mode at SBN without failure. The only downtime was caused by scheduled facility maintenance and unexpected power outage. The last verification of the Mirror site was successfully performed in March 2009.

Historical Documents

The historical milestones along with their associated documents, are provided in Previous Mirror Site Test Reports.

Detailed descriptions of the Mirror site can be found in the following documents: