Dedicated hosting for a server suite to support the APLAWS content management system.

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) funded 25 Local Government Online (LGOL) Pathfinder projects in 2001 and 2002, with the aim of exploring and developing new ways of implementing e-government.

One of the projects, the use of Accessible and Personalised Local Authority Web Sites (APLAWS(1)) to provide personalised access via the Internet, was developed by a consortium of London local authorities, Royal National Institute for the Blind, Age Concern, voluntary groups and community groups from each borough partner. Hardware was supplied by Sun Microsystems(2) and the software developed by ArsDigita, now part of Red Hat(3).

On completion of the development phase, BOCC successfully tendered for providing hosting, connectivity and hardware support for the demonstration system. BOCC also manage the open source software updates and database management issues, as Red Hat requires them.

The servers are managed and monitored by BOCC's own support staff 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The hosting includes monitoring, power, maintenance and backup. This has allowed the developers and the project consortium to concentrate on aspects other than hosting.

The system has now been deployed on public websites and Intranets(4) and BOCC has also provided separate hosting for an APLAWS based Intranet site, based at BOCC and accessed over a dedicated leased line.

The APLAWS based Intranet site is hosted on Sun Solaris OS, using 64bit Sun Microsystems architecture. The site runs on a clustered array of web, application and database servers pulling information from the central Oracle database system. Separate development and staging servers are used by the APLAWS development team.

The APLAWS based Internet site is now hosted on Red Hat Linux OS, using 32bit Intel architecture. The site runs on a clustered array of web, application and database servers pulling information from the central Oracle database system.

Development and staging platforms are also hosted by BOCC to ensure testing is as close the architecture of the production system as possible.

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