[ome-users] Large OMERO Implementation questions

[Wood, Christopher]

Hello Everyone,

We are considering  implementing OMERO as a standard for storing microscopy images at our institute. A typical year would see about 3 TB of image data, and consist of ~300 users in more than 20 different labs. Our I.T. department is concerned about the amount of disk space that will be needed to store and backup all of the data, in addition to providing fast access to the most requested data. We won't have 300 heavy users of the system; more likely (guessing) 50 heavy users with different data sets being imported, exported, and viewed at the same time.

So the questions I have are:


 1.  What Hardware specs: How much RAM, number of CPUs, given the number of users and amount of data?
 2.  Is any one else using OMERO on this large of a scale? If so, can any tips be provided?
 3.  Is Linux the best server OS for this? Apache the best web server?
 4.  How can we improve the response times for OMERO (tune the performance)?
 5.  Would it be recommended to run the database separate hardware from the OMERO server?
 6.  Are the other ways to separate the processes to improve performance?
 7.  We currently have a tiered system that keeps the files most often accessed on fast storage, but keeps less accessed items on slower disks.  Will this type of a setup be possible with OMERO, as long as we can mount the data directories to omero server?

Thanks in advance.

Chris