[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Setting up demo for smallish mixed consortium

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On 5/4/2012 11:57 AM, Jill Minor wrote:
> We are a mixed consortium straddling the Virginia/Tennessee border. We
> need to know how to set up an Evergreen demo and so far, we have not
> been able to make head or tail of anyone’s advice. There are two public
> library systems and two small college libraries involved. We have given
> up on the idea of cloud hosting because we hear it is very slow, and we
> don’t want to spook our staffs any more than necessary. We would like to
> host our own demo. It must be accessible to every consortium location
> and handle a sample of 500 records. Please, in plain English, what
> equipment do we require for our demo? Would it be advisable to just go
> ahead and purchase a server that will eventually contain the entire
> Evergreen installation and put our demo on it? How large a server would
> we need to buy?

One of the many nice things about Evergreen is that it can make use good 
use of multiple servers.  As a result, since your starting point is 
setting up a small demo system, a server you get for the demo can later 
be repurposed to become part (say an application server or load 
balancer) of your production Evergreen setup.  Alternatively, it could 
become a development or possibly a test system.

One advantage of this approach is that you can defer the capital expense 
of getting all of the servers (or a big-enough server) for your 
production system until you need it.

Since you want 500 or so records in your demo system, and making the 
assumption that at most only a few tens of library staff would be 
accessing the demo simultaneously, I agree with Justin that a server 
with 4 CPU cores and 4 G of RAM would be plenty to run a demo system on. 
  100G of disk space would be plenty, and 50G would be adequate.

The number of CPU cores is just a suggestion; if you buy a new server 
rather than use an existing one, there are plenty of entry-level server 
models that *start* at 6 or 8 cores.

That leaves the operating system -- I recommend running Evergreen on 
either Debian or Ubuntu Server, so if you go with one of those, I would 
also recommend getting an assurance from the server manufacturer that 
their product is compatible with one of those OSs.  You can also check 
Debian's [1] and Ubuntu's [2] server compatibility lists.

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn
[2] http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/server/

Regards,

Galen
-- 
Galen Charlton
Director of Support and Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 770-709-5581
cell:   +1 404-984-4366
skype:  gmcharlt
web:    http://www.esilibrary.com
Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org & 
http://evergreen-ils.org