Thursday, 9 October 2008

10 TB Conquest Server

Finally our new Dell Server arrived! It has been quite a mission to set the whole thing up. All I can say is that there wher tons of boxes and lots of manuals to go through, but it was worth it. The Dell server and rack are amazing! Everything snaps into place and looks so neat and tidy. (Compared to our other cheap cabinets).

We have the following system now:

Dell PowerEdge 2950
  • Windows 2008 Server x64
  • 2 x 2GHz Quad Core Xeon, 4GB RAM
  • 6 Disks in RAID 5 for OS and DB
Dell PowerVualt MD3000
  • 15 x 1TB SATA HDD (RAID5 2x hot spares)
  • 10TB Usable Space
  • 2 x SAS Connectors
The Windows 2008 Server system seems to have taken the Conquest installation quite well. I have had no hicups yet. The software installed for was the following:
I have only encountered one setup issue at the moment and that is regarding the Windows 2008 and Dell Storage management software. It seems as though once again Windows will only recognise a certain amount of hard disk space for a single partition. The magic number in Windows 2008 64bit seems to be roughly 2TB. So I have had to make 6 partitions for the Dicom Data. I am a bit concerned how Conquest is going to handle this as I have never played with the MAGDevices functionality, but accoring to their forum it should work. 
Partitioning the disks and spanning the dicom data across multiple partitions is probably going to break the Conquest Web Viewer system as it can only look in one folder for images. I will have to take a look at this and make some modifications to the code to make it function better. I am also experimenting with ZIP functinoality allowing users to download a zip file containing all the DICOM images in a series to thier local machine via the web viewer interface.

I will post some more information once I have the system is live.

Labels: ,