[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Linux VPS

[Bruce Willms]

Hi Ben, et al.,

Thanks for the information.  I thought I had sent a reply a long time ago, but I just discovered that it somehow got hung up in my outbox, and I can't dislodge it.  So I'm sending another.

Would a set-up like the one below be sufficient for a smallish instance of Evergreen, or do you think we would need something more robust?  Our collection is small, probably less than 30,000 titles, and we don't expect to do much circulation, being essentially a research library.

    4    GB RAM
    4    CPU Cores
    96  GB SSD Storage
    4    TB Transfer
    40   Gbps Network In
    500  Mbps Network Out

This bundle would cost $40 a month, which is quite reasonable in my book.  I don't know yet what sort of backup or other support is provided for this price.  

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Best regards,
Bruce


-----Original Message-----
From: Open-ils-general [mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Ben Shum
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2015 8:25 PM
To: Evergreen Discussion Group <open-ils-general at list.georgialibraries.org>
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Linux VPS

Hi Bruce,

I've used Linode for personal applications like IRC and testing web services, but have not applied it towards any live Evergreen systems.
I have created test droplets with DigitalOcean too, back when they were one of the leaders in use of SSD disk storage, and that was certainly a nice hosted environment.  The SSDs make things speedier when you don't necessarily have all the memory you'd like to run things fast.

These are some areas I would be check before using any third-party host environment:

1)  Making sure to spec out a powerful enough system (or more than one instance if needed).  Getting the right amount of resources for CPU, RAM, disk space can be very important when putting together a proper Evergreen system.  Even a test server could malfunction on less than 2 GB of RAM (with memory killers wrecking your installed instance).  So having an appropriate sized instance is important.

2)  Knowing what your data protection services are like.  In the past, with groups like DigitalOcean, they had issues where the data in the instances could be leaked due to not properly deleting content between node rebuilds (which has since been fixed, as far as I last read).
But how safe is your data "in the cloud"?  What rules govern how your instances are accessed?  With library data, I try to be cautious on this front.

I'll let others chime in when they can, but hopefully this gets some conversation going for you.

Good luck in your investigations, and feel free to ask further questions as applicable.

-- Ben

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 10:12 PM, Bruce Willms <bwillms at frontiernet.net> wrote:
> We are just gearing up to set up an instance of Evergreen and are 
> wondering if anyone is running the system on a hosted VPS service like 
> Linode.  It seems like a reasonable solution in our case since we 
> don’t have IT staff to support a server, etc.  I’m curious to know if 
> others have done this and what their experience has been – good, bad, 
> or otherwise.  Or if this is a recipe for disaster.
>
>
>
> I’m new to this list and to Evergreen, and looking for some pointers 
> from experienced hands.
>
>
>
> Bruce Willms
>
> East Side Freedom Library
>
> St. Paul, MN
>
>
>
>
>
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>



--
Benjamin Shum
Evergreen Systems Manager
Bibliomation, Inc.
24 Wooster Ave.
Waterbury, CT 06708
203-577-4070, ext. 113