MAN-HA is a project funded by the EU and implemented by the Polish MAN and HPC units for the benefit of the ICT society (academic, research and development, administration, government institutions, Polish Academy of Sciences institutes, students, and research companies).

The aim of the project is to integrate selected services available in the PIONIER network and develop new services with the following characteristics: increased reliability and security, easy access, support for federated mechanisms, work in the cloud environment.

MAN-HA continues work carried out by the PIONIER consortium members in projects such as: PLATON, NewMAN and KMD / KMD2 and activities related to PIONIER CERT and digital libraries.

Thanks to this project infrastructure in 21 MAN centres will be expanded with new elements: firewalls, servers and produced or purchased software.

The specific objectives of the project:

a) supporting critical services

Defining high reliability and high availability (HA - High Availability) resources, connecting dedicated PIONIER network channels between the centres, which will share a copy of the central portal, configuration of disk space of Universal Archiving Services shared for user’s reliable virtual machine, launching critical services such as SQL database, the webconf teleconference system.

b) establishing the Polish Federation of Identities

Setting down the regulations, a cooperation agreement, formal documentation and technical support for federation members, starting the meta data server, launching the information service, joining the eduGAIN confederation, starting the federated authentication servers in selected institutions.

c) increasing the level of safety and reliability of MAN units in access to the PIONIER network

Purchasing machines and software which will become the critical services protection system of the PIONIER network matched in such a way that, on the one hand, it will ensure requirement for high availability of the entire system and, on the other hand, it will guarantee protection for all required levels.

d) providing data processing services for digital libraries

Creating the methodology of data scaling services for digital libraries based on campus services, development of the data processing architecture for digital libraries, notably in the context of interoperability and reliability, implementation of digital objects processing service, implementation of digital objects migration services, implementation OCR services, implementation data conversion services, integration with dLibra, dLab and the Digital Libraries Federation.

e) creating a central access point to the selected PIONIER network services

Implementing a mechanism of the campus services user’s central portal, creating safe information exchange mechanisms between the central point of access and management mechanisms located in various facilities, supporting the user’s federated login.

f) supporting the resource reservation on demand (ad-hoc)

Providing access to the most popular interactive applications (Platon campus computing services) from anywhere and at any time from the user terminal, adjusting resource dispatcher mechanisms to immediate booking: minimizing additional time buffers, which will result in fast allocation.

g) integration with the public cloud

Presentation of services exemplified by  sharing an office software.

h) providing a cloud-based relational database

Separating servers in different facilities, installation and configuration of the database system based on OpenSource solutions, configuration of the PIONIER network dedicated channels for replication of databases between centres, creating the database managing mechanisms according to the guidelines of the portal (on user’s request).

i) implementation of the federation in Polish Bibliographic Databases System and the Infona system.