Elephant Shed

The credativ GmbH PostgreSQL® Competence Center develops and administers the freely available Open Source project Elephant Shed.
Elephant Shed is currently quickly and easily available in the form of packages for the existing Debian operating system environment, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These packages are administered by our PostgreSQL® experts and kept updated in our repository for you.

Additional versions for use on the most important virtualization and cloud platforms are already in development.

What is Elephant Shed?

Elephant Shed is a powerful appliance, which provides a complete PostgreSQL® database environment including all the appropriate tools required for operation. This appliance can be used at any time as a database server available for immediate use. It is suitable for use on hardware as well as in virtualized environments.

Services provided by and with Elephant Shed

Elephant Shed can be integrated into your in-house infrastructure as an appliance without any further dependencies and without a vendor lock. Numerous established Open Source projects have been integrated into the appliance, which can be reached via a convenient web interface and cover all areas of administration of a PostgreSQL® database.

A central appliance dashboard provides the requisite overview. This dashboard can be used to access a multitude of other services. These include the provision and preparation of all important metrics by Prometheus and Grafana. All the relevant log information is compiled in automatically generated reports.  pgBadger is used for this purpose.

The integrated backup solution is already preconfigured to not only enable the recovery of the data, but also a down-to-the-second definition of the recovery time (point-in-time recovery ). The backup functionality is implemented by pgBackRest and supplemented by the GUI supplied by credativ®.

To enable the convenient independent administration of the databases, pgAdmin4 has also been integrated into the appliance. All important functions that are needed to manage the underlying system are provided via the web interface. This allows services to be started, stopped, and restarted, log messages to be viewed or even the entire system to be updated. The management functions are executed via the system frontend Cockpit. The web interface also provides a shell that enables direct access via the console. The shell is launched directly in the browser. A direct SSH login is not required. The Shell In A Box project was used for this purpose. Comprehensive and continuously updated documentation is supplied for Elephant Shed and also provided via the integrated web interface.

  • Available as an entirely free Open Source solution
  • No costs for licenses or subscriptions
  • Available for x86 and ppc64
  • Preconfigured and tested system
  • Continuous software maintenance
  • Huge time savings during commissioning
  • Individual customizations and extensions possible
  • Optional: Training sessions
  • Optional: Service and support by the PostgreSQL® Competence Center

Our service naturally doesn’t end with the provision of an appliance. We also offer all our services for PostgreSQL® systems for the Elephant Shed PostgreSQL® appliance. This starts with a customized setup service in line with the customer’s wishes or requirements, as well as the integration into their environment. At the customer’s request, we can naturally tailor the appliance to a customer’s specific requirements or integrate extensions as required. Our customers can also take advantage of a support offer – with a 24/7 support option.

Open Source Support Center
PostgreSQL® Competence Center

Have we piqued your interest?

Our experts will be happy to answer your specific questions and support you in choosing the right open source solution for your project.

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The credativ®
Open Source Support Center

Our answers to the most frequently asked questions:

Our support is focused on the actual needs of our customers. This means that we naturally offer more support than the traditional support offered by many manufacturers. But what’s important, and this applies for any software that is operated in business-critical areas, is that the operation is appropriately secured. This is where we provide technical support at the manufacturer level with guaranteed service level agreements.
All of our employees are experienced Open Source developers and administrators. We are the replacement for missing manufacturer support, and support the entire lifecycle of your Open Source software by means of our Open Source Support Center. We provide the necessary support and all the services for your entire Open Source stack under one roof.
Our service and support contracts take account of your interests, not those of investors. We deliberately use completely different contract and price models to those of countless international software manufacturers and are proud that our fair support offers are a solid and reliable basis for long-term and successful cooperation with large national and international customers. We also want to provide a model that is completely independent of the usual factors, such as the number of users, the number of CPUs/cores and servers used or similar limiting factors. We would be pleased to discuss further details with you personally. More about the operation of our Open Source Support Centers
We guarantee it! You receive the certainty that you need. We are always there for you. Around the clock, 365 days a year. You can find more information under 24x7 support.
Don’t worry! We operate without an intervening call center. You receive direct access to our Open Source specialists. You can reach our support via central dispatching by phone, ticket system, or email. You can find more information under Availability.
Our Open Source Support Center is located in the Federal Republic of Germany and all our technical specialists are employed on a permanent basis. We provide both national and international support, in German or English as required.
Our technical support covers a range of popular Open Source projects, which are often operated in business-critical applications. You can find a selection of the projects supported by our Open Source Support Center in our software overview. More information is available under Software.
Absolutely! When a technical fault occurs, the cause needs to be determined quickly and precisely, and eliminated, or at least an initial workaround needs to be found. That’s why we offer guaranteed service level agreements for availability as well as for different response times.