Finally our server is up and running. We had some issues with setting up the DAS array as I managed to delete the Disk Group from the Dell Modular Disk Storage Manager and loose communication with the Dell MD3000 storage array. Eventually after moving the RAID controller to a different PCI slot the communication was restored.
The most interesting part of the setup was getting the Windows to see the array as one 10TB partition. The storage array software that comes with the Dell equipment only allows you to create virtual disks that are 2035.87MB (2TB) each. So I had to create 6 virtual disks and then use the Windows Disk Management tool to create a Spanned GPT partition of 11171.40 GB (11TB).
The Windows Disk Management tool however was a bit misleading, when you select spanned disk and try to create the spanned GPT partition it says in the dialog that only 2TB is available. This seems to be a bug in the dialog, because when you create the spanned volume the full 11TB is visible in windows.
Once the setup of the disks was complete the rest of the configuration was pretty simple. I chose to seperate the different drives as follows to allow for better system stability.
C:\ - Windows Partition +/- 50GB
D:\ - Conquest Application, WAMP +/- 500GB
F:\ - Dicom Files - 11TB
How to Setup Conquest Dicom Server with 10TB of storage:
Operating System:
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 x64
Server:
Dell Power Edge 2950
Processor: 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5405 @ 2.00GHz
RAM: 4096 MB
Disks: 6 x 136GB SAS (RAID 5, 1 Hotspare)
Storage:
Dell MD3000
Disks: 15 x 1TB SATA Disks (RAID 5, 2 hotspares)
Connection: Directly Attached Storage using 2 x SAS Cables
Setup of Disks:
- Create virtual disks using Modular Disk Storage Manager and map them to the server.
- Use Windows Disk Management Console to create a spanned volume using GPT. (http://kb.ciprico.com/lore/article.php?id=315 , Thanks to Jason for the Link!)
- Install Conquest and all other applications as per usual making sure to setup the dicom.ini file correclty to point the MAG0 device to the new big partition.
