Daily Archives: February 11, 2010

Equinox Software, Inc, announces new hosting and support services for the Koha open source ILS to libraries. Two different packages will be available for libraries to choose from based on their needs and resources.

Koha on Demand
is aimed at libraries looking for quick provisioning of new Koha databases. This service provides a modern, full-featured ILS with system administration managed by Equinox.

Koha Dedicated Hosting
provides a virtual private server (VPS) with Koha installed. This service is geared toward libraries looking to outsource the provisioning, hosting, and basic maintenance of a Koha database while still having direct access to customize and develop their Koha installations as they see fit.
According to Galen Charlton, Equinox Vice-President for Data Services, “Equinox Software will, of course, continue to support and develop Evergreen. However, we are taking advantage of in-house Koha expertise to be able to diversify our service offerings. In addition, we plan to build on our expertise in resource sharing in the context of a single ILS and extend it to encompass sharing among multiple ILSs.”

There has been debate in the Koha community about certain issues regarding development and community assets. One of Equinox’s advantages for Koha customers is the Equinox Promise(http://blog.esilibrary.com/2009/09/16/the-equinox-promise/).Full access to the source code will always be available to our hosted customers, to use, modify, or redistribute under the terms of the GPL. Furthermore, source code will be available in a form that makes it convenient for a customer to manage and submit contributions to the Koha project.
Brad LaJeunesse, CEO of Equinox Software, says “Equinox supports a global, unified Koha project whose assets, including global trademarks and project-websites, are held on behalf of Koha users and developers everywhere by a vendor-neutral Koha foundation or similar non-profit entity.”
About Koha
Created in 1999 by Katipo Communications for the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand, Koha is the first open source Integrated Library System to be used worldwide. The software is a full-featured ILS with a dual database design (text based and RDBMS) built to be library standards compliant. Koha’s OPAC, staff, and self-checkout interfaces are all web applications. Distributed under the General Public License (GPL), libraries are fee to use and install Koha themselves or to purchase support and development service.
For more information on Koha, please visithttp://koha.orgorhttp://koha-community.org.
About Equinox Software, Inc.
Founded by the original Evergreen designers and developers, Equinox Software is a growing team of skilled professionals who bring a comprehensive array of talent to continue improving Evergreen, the consortial, open source Integrated Library System (ILS). Equinox not only continues to develop Evergreen but, also consults, migrates, integrates, supports and offers hosting packages for libraries that prefer not to maintain local servers. Equinox also engages and supports a rapidly expanding Evergreen community.
For more information on Equinox Software, please visithttp://www.esilibrary.com

Webhostuk Limited (http://www.webhost.uk.net), one of the UK’s leading web hosting companies, has today unveiled a new range of dedicated servers. The new servers which are managed Dell servers, use Intel Dual Core and Quad Core processors. The servers are designed for excellent and robust performance, faster response times and improved scalability. With the new Quad Core Xeon processors, powerful RAM and high capacity SATA hard drives, a user can run the most complex programs/applications with relative ease. The new Dual Quad Core server delivers eight processing cores in two physical processors which in effect offers a substantial increase in performance over its previous generation of single quad-core processors.

The launch of these new range of managed servers will now give the best dedicated hosting experience to small, medium and large business models. The company now offers free managed services along with all their dedicated server series to make things simple and easy to manage for their end user clients.

The servers reside in one of the finest World-class data centers and are connected by redundant gigabit connections. All servers come with generous bandwidth allocations and superb network backbones supported with Webhostuk Limited’s commitment to offer unmatched service and support, which helps the customers to deliver superior level of service and consistency to their end-users and achieve greater profitability. All servers are available in both Linux and Windows configurations with the choice of award winning control panel – WHM/cpanel and Parallels Plesk. A range of additional services and features such as dedicated IP’s, additional drive storage, RAID arrays, SSL certificates etc, can be added by the customer to suit their exact requirements.

Abbie Clayton, Head of Business Development, Webhostuk Limited, says “Big, small, short, tall; Webhost.uk.net continually strives to offer the best possible server solutions, equipped with the latest processing power. Our robust series of managed dedicated servers are capable and ready to meet the ever growing needs of web hosting customers and their business. We now offer managed services free of charge so that our customers can solely concentrate on the productivity of their business and revenues .

Webhostuk Limited’s dedicated servers range (http://www.webhosting.uk.net) is backed by 24×7 technical support (Email and Live Chat), offering a 100% SLA network uptime guarantee.

After thorough testing, UK web hosting provider eUKhost has launched its new Cloud VPS Hosting service, powered by its new cloud environment that is based on VMware virtualization platform.

According to its Monday announcement, eUKhost’s Cloud VPS Hosting offers one of the best solutions available for delivering 100 percent uptime in a virtual server environment. VMware’s Fault Tolerance and High Availability features help eliminates even the smallest disruptions in the event of hardware failures along with its Distributed Resource Scheduler feature that continuously monitors virtual machines and physical servers.

“At eUKhost, our intention was to make the Cloud Hosting Service generally available to all users worldwide after successful testing of the product late last year,” eUKhost business development manager Ryan Watson said in a statement. “We received numerous requests from users wanting to test our cloud hosting environment and test VPSs were provided to some of our existing customers. These tests assessed the speed, functionality and reliability of our Cloud Hosting environment. Based on the results of these tests and feedback received, we decided to go ahead with the full launch of Cloud VPS Hosting, a service that will deliver peace of mind and satisfaction to our valued customers.”

Hosted in its Milton Keynes data center facility, the current Cloud Hosting environment features highly available and fault tolerant clusters with multiple hardware nodes, while preserving the flexibility to choose between any type of OS, application and hardware. If any single node experiences failure for any reason, VMware will automatically move the affected websites to a backup node, eliminating the possibility of any downtime.

With plans starting as low as £30 (or about $47) per month, customers can get enterprise-class hosting that delivers superior performance, reliability and scalability. Cloud VPS hosting plans are available for both Microsoft Windows and Linux OS. Each plan includes pre-installed software, including ASP.NET and SQL Server on Windows and PHP, Perl, and MySQL on Linux. Additionally, Cloud VPS plans feature 24×7×365 expert technical support and a 100 percent uptime guarantee.