HighWire, Scholarly Publishing Technology Provider, Deploys DR Scheme to Restore Data Within Minutes

HighWire Press, Inc., a scholarly publishing technology provider, is implementing a DR center designed to enable full platform functionality and data to be restored within a matter of hours, potentially minutes.

The recovery service will be deployed to all HighWire customers commencing in July. HighWire’s managed hosting facility partner, Faction, Inc., is a multi-cloud platform-as-a-service provider, VMware partner and AWS partner. IT has multiple geographic locations both throughout the US and globally.

This approach to DR utilizes an always-on or pilot light method whereby critical core elements of HighWire’s data infrastructure are configured and constantly running, but at a diminished, standby capacity. Should the need arise, the architecture can become a fully functioning production environment within a matter of hours – if not minutes.

HighWire has implemented a number of performance tuning and enhancement measures over recent years. The Covid-19 traffic surges have demonstrated the robust nature of the delivery infrastructure (for example, traffic on the bioRxiv and medRxiv sites has increased from an average of 4 million and 1 million unique monthly page views respectively, up to 20 million page views in April), while remaining responsive with 99.9+% uptime.

This move is the next step in ensuring that HighWire continues to provide a reliable, stable, and scalable hosting services for its customers.

“Leveraging cutting-edge, high quality tools and partners is a critical part of the roadmap for our SaaS offering,” said Todd McGee, VP of technology, platform and innovation, HighWire, “By partnering with Faction to provide rapid and reliable DR services, we can provide reliable restoration of data at a speed we believe is unparalleled within the industry.“