[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] server question from a newbie

[Soulliere, Robert]

Hi Joy,

We are a college library with a similar number of holdings. For the early testing phase of Evergreen, we used a Dell Optiplex GX270 desktop with Ubuntu 7.10 installed as our "server". We still use this as our test server for upgrades and patches. In essence, you really don't need an expensive server for testing since an old desktop will do for this phase. Going live might require more powerful hardware of course but keeping the old second server for testing has been extremely helpful for testing, practice and training in our case. If it is a grant for exploring Evergreen, you might not need to request hardware at this time. If it is a grant to be committed to going with Evergreen, I would add a request for a dedicated server. Regarding costs, our eventual production server costs us around $5000 - $6000 and consists of the following specs:

DELL PowerEdge 1950:
Quad Core IntelR XeonR E5420, 2x6MB Cache, 2.5GHz, 1333MHz

I think you may have other options as well such as having Evergreen hosted offsite so you might want to explore all your options to find out what is best in your case before thinking about a server.

Installing Linux and Evergreen from scratch on our own test server didn't cost us any money per se but it did take us a lot of time (which could be calculated as a cost) to set up. In the long run, We learned a lot and are better off from the experience and knowledge we gained about Evergreen and other software products and technologies. But again, it does take time and presents many challenges along the way.

Hope that helps,
Robert




-----Original Message-----
From: open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org [mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Joy Wandrey
Sent: July 9, 2009 9:43 AM
To: open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org
Subject: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] server question from a newbie

Hi all,
Being a complete and utter newbie with Evergreen, I have a few questions...which may have been answered in the manuals, but I probably missed it.
First, we are a small library, only about 30,000 items or so, and around 5000 active library card holders at any one time. We are also fairly capable with Windows, but utter newbies with Linux systems. We've been playing with the desktop version of Ubuntu as an introduction to Linux, and to gain some basic Linux experience before we count on it as a base for Evergreen, but have not tried to install in a server configuration yet, as we lack a server to play around with. We are writing for an LSTA grant, the funds for which would be available by October 1. The deadline for having the grant paperwork in is July 15, and I'm really trying to figure out if I will have to buy a second server, as our current server has Windows on it. So, the meat of the question may be:

Will Evergreen work well with a library of our size if it runs in a virtual machine with say 1GB of RAM dedicated to the virtual machine?

If not, What are the minimum server requirements for us? (we will do better than the minimum, but I still need to know in order to gauge what we purchase)

Thanks for hanging on through this torturous message, and for any answers that come my way!

Joy Wandrey
Director
Washington County Public Library
Springfield, KY


This E-mail contains privileged and confidential information intended
only for the individual or entity named in the message.  If the reader
of this message is not the intended recipient, or the agent responsible
to deliver it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that
any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication
is prohibited.  If this communication was received in error, please
notify the sender by reply E-mail immediately, and delete and destroy
the original message.