SYSTEMS

By John O’Brien, Contributing Editor -- PALO ALTO, CA -- Stanford University and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced their joint undertaking, the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) program, is performing well at the 47 locations around the world where it has been deployed in large scale tests. The program is the product of an eighteen-month collaboration between Stanford Libraries and Sun. Its purpose is to solve the increasingly urgent problem of maintaining permanent access to electronic data, while protecting it from data corruption, neglect or abuse. The LOCKSS system is an open-source system based on Java™ technology. The program is designed to run on low-cost computers, without the need for central administration. All the computers in the system continually communicate amongst themselves, checking their hard disks at random for file corruption of alteration. If a problem is found, an autonomous caching system replaces the corrupted file with an intact copy. Each system can monitor it’s own level of redundancy as well. “The concept behind the LOCKSS program is to build a reliable, resistant system that does not rely on secrets—technology such as cryptography or firewalls,” said David Rosenthal, distinguished engineer, Sun Microsystems. “Instead, the program is based on the theory that a greater number of good data sources can overwhelm bad data delivered by any one or more ‘rogues’ in the system. In this way, the program is akin to a neighborhood watch—if all members of a neighborhood are vigilant, they are likely to spot and report unusual activity to the authorities.” Currently, a total of 98 institutions worldwide are utilizing the LOCKSS system to protect materials published on the Internet, among them the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The AAAS publishes the journal Science and its digital version Science Online ( http://www.sciencemag.org/ ). Science Online is an essential resource for science news and research from around the world. “The content in Science Online is extremely important to researchers and scholars,” said Michael Spinella, director of AAAS. “Our online content provides special enhancements and links that are not available in print. Preserving both the text and these unique characteristics of online works is critical to scholars’ ability to conduct research efficiently. Maintaining the integrity of online documents is a more difficult problem than merely archiving text. We participate in several digital archiving experiments, but the LOCKSS program shows the greatest promise to protect and preserve the full functionality of online documents.” Bmj.com (http://www.bmj.com), published by the British Medical Association, contains the full text of articles published in the weekly British Medical Journal since January 1994 as well as an increasing amount of material that is unique to the site. “We want to help doctors everywhere practice better medicine and to be at the forefront of international debates on health,” said Tony Delamothe, editor of bmj.com. “Maintaining long-term security and integrity of our materials is crucial to those objectives. The LOCKSS program is unique in being able to provide this for us, and at a price we can afford.” In time, the system may also prove useful in protecting data without cryptography or firewalls and shows signs of viability for commercial application. The LOCKSS project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation (NSF), Stanford University Libraries and Sun Microsystems. It was initiated in May 2000 and includes sites at 41 universities. More information about LOCKSS can be found at http://lockss.stanford.edu