[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI-based PACS DICOM server

[Bryan N Iotti]

One of the really cool things of ZFS is that when I want to upgrade the 
storage space, I can replace the 1TB drives one at a time and swap in 
2TB drives. ZFS will then grow my pool when I have 2x2TB installed... ;)

Honestly, it took us since 2004 to have 640GB, I think they won't run 
out any time soon ;)

For backups, as I said I'm not too happy with using network drives... 
I'd like a "sentient", SMART-monitored machine. We'll see if they are 
willing to fork some cash for it.

System has been running for 8 weeks now, very happy with it. Finding 
thesis materials for the students now takes minutes, not days 
(everything was scattered over three systems, without indexes).
Only issue was that the transfers over DICOM would have high ping 
times... This has been traced back to the routing tables employed in the 
University's network. Changing subnets fixed it.

Bryan

On 09/ 7/12 07:09 PM, Magnus wrote:
> On Aug 28, 2012, at 1:06 PM, Bryan N Iotti wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Outstanding! I've done this before, about 10 years ago for a network of medical facilities in eastern North Carolina, and had just recently been thinking about how much more appropriate Illumos would be for this task than Linux (which is what I had used back then).
>
> I've been out of the loop on radiology software developments over the last decade, so I'm glad you included some of the details of your implementation. Actually, I don't know if you maintain a blog, but I think it would make a terribly interesting blog post for people in radiology circles to read about.
>
>> 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).
> One of the major problems of running a PACS system, as you know, is the insatiable appetite for more and more storage. I wonder if you may end up having to install an eSATA controller and attach more disks when the microserver gets full.
>
> For backups, if you can get a hold of another low end machine with a lot of disk to run Illumos on, you could send zfs snapshots to it over ssh.
>
> Your work here is directly applicable to the same technologies used for humans. Actually, I've turned away a good bit of DICOM consulting work over the years. There's a lot of demand for it, and few people who understand it apparently. I think Illumos could find itself VERY comfortable at the heart of a large institutional PACS system.
>
> Nice work, and thanks for sharing it with us!
>
> -M
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