[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI-based PACS DICOM server

[Bryan N Iotti]

Folks,

just thought you'd like to know that the Veterinary Sciences Faculty of
the University Of Torino, Italy, is now running an open source PACS
DICOM server based on OpenIndiana, administered by yours truly.

Pretty much, it revolves around a zone that contains a copy of the
DCM4CHEE open source Java PACS, itself running on JBoss and a PostgreSQL
9.1 DB.

Due to budget restrictions, my hardware choice was the HP Proliant
Microserver, with 8GB RAM and 2x250GB mirrored root disks, along with
2x1TB mirrored 7200RPM SATA drives for the "tank" pool. All of these
disks run a weekly scrub and are SMART monitored. For now we rsync
backups of the data to a mirrored 2TB LaCie network disk (on the other
side of the building is the best I could do), but I'm not too happy with
that solution and would prefer something that is SMART capable. The OS
and zone have been dumped to USB media and are manually backed up (no
modifications are made to the system itself during normal operation, we
really only care about the patient data).

No hardware issues at all. It recognized everything fine. Deployment
took two hours and then we were loading data (I had preinstalled
everything in the zone at home and migrated it, greatly simplifying the
process).

It runs very very well and has been performing fine for the past six
weeks. During the summer break we loaded the 640GBs of X Rays, CT and
MRI scans that the hospital has acquired over the past eight years. We
have had no problems so far and are very happy with it.

This system also carries the Weasis DICOM viewer as one of the
deployable packages, so it has a centralized update point for all the
workstations that use that viewer in conjunction with the PACS.

The staff is happy because they can finally find all of their diagnostic
images in one place, instead of going through three or four systems by
hand. Makes getting all of your thesis data together a breeze ;).

I have been asked to give a small presentation on this system both for
the Faculty and for some Vet congresses that are coming up. In the past
I was very clear with the Profs about the fact that this service is made
possible by the unique features of OpenIndiana, with zones, ZFS and its
networking stack, I will be sure to stress this point during the
presentation as well.

I hope I get the chance to install several similar systems in the future.

Thank you all, such a system would not exist without your continued effort.

   Bryan