[Koha-devel] Hardware requirements and cluster scalability

[Olli-Antti Kivilahti]

Good day to everybody at the devel-list.
And greetings from Finland!

The library of Joensuu has started a project to compare different open 
source library systems, mainly Koha and Evergreen, with the goal of 
moving from our current closed source system to open source. We are 
planning to create a consortium of minimum of a ~20 libraries, but if 
open ILS are found to be superrior, probably the consortium can easily 
grow to ~250 libraries with ~5 million articles and ~150 000 
transactions/hour.

I have been hard pressed to find answers to the hardware requirements of 
Koha and Evergreen and have been instructed to ask here on devel-list by 
your library managers.

My main interests are the hardware requirements of the said large 
consortium mainframe. How well does it cluster? What sort of hard disk 
and ram requirements are there? How many pc units with for example 2GHz 
cpu, 2Gb RAM do we need? Could every library host their own databases or 
should they be centralized? What are the average search speeds using 
simple SELECTs and then complex JOINs. What are the system bottlenecks? 
Can the OPAC be integrated with Drupal/Liferay so it can be compatible 
with our new web-services strategy?

Are there any publications I could read about these topics?

Happy coding!

-- 
Olli-Antti Kivilahti
Open Library 2013
Library of Joensuu