[ome-users] Resources needed for providing an OMERO service

[Sascha Neinert]

Hi Douglas,

thanks a lot for your response! I would think that we would initially start at a (much) smaller scale, something like 10-100 Users and maybe 1 or 2 TB of images, having one imaging bioinformatician and one IT guy (me), both only partly available for OMERO. 

After everything has been setup and is running, after the initial learning and testing phase etc. - could a „small“ OMERO server be provided with only a few hours work per week (or even per month)? Or would it need more continuous attention?

Best regards, Sascha

--
Sascha Neinert
CECAD RRZK IT Service
Regional Computing Center (RRZK)
University of Cologne
Phone: +49-221 478-84051 / +49-221 470-89624
Mail: sascha.neinert at uni-koeln.de





> Am 21.02.2017 um 16:22 schrieb Douglas Russell <douglas_russell at hms.harvard.edu>:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Hardware wise it is difficult to estimate as it will really depend on the number of users, type and volume of data, and the workloads introduced by whatever workflow you decide upon.
> 
> As far as provisioned human resources though, I would say that this is not too different than provisioning any kind of managed service. Installing, patching, updating, adding extensions and similar, if your IT department is good, should only be about as time consuming as the constituent parts (e.g. database schema upgrades, nginx configuration, etc). The configuration and optimisation of the OMERO service itself could be quite time consuming if your IT department have to learn all about it which they probably would not have to do with the database and nginx.
> 
> I feel like the biggest difficulty we have faced at HMS is in integrating distributed components together. We have run into issues that existing services may not suffer from, not because of faults in OMERO, but simply because the resources we are making use of have not been integrated on-site in this way before. For example, we hit a problem where firewall timeouts between OMERO and the db and filesystem share were causing system failure, this was difficult to track down. This is a long way of saying that I think the ideal way to get started is to minimize the complexity of the installation. If having OMERO, OMERO.web, database and block storage (SAN or local) in one machine is possible for the workload you are planning, I would go with that. If you then need to start making use of NFS for the filesystem, or a non-local database server for the db, or a second server for OMERO.web, then I would introduce those later as required, but not all at one time so that each can be tested independently with the otherwise operational monolith.
> 
> Finally, I would add that provisioning a service like this really requires heavy buy-in from your IT department if it is to be reliable for large scale use. Here at HMS, our quad wide rollout has (roughly speaking) ~1/2 project manager , ~1/2 developer (need for this depends on customizations I guess, but if this person has OMERO expertise it helps a lot to have them as a consultant to IT) and ~1/4 IT devops. The project manager also has support personnel who are involved in the logistics and the devops has specialists in storage, networking, etc to call upon. We also have a Glencoe Software support contract which is also extremely valuable, especially when we run into new errors that have not been seen before which have often proven to be caused by the local deployment environment.
> 
> Sorry it is so anecdotal, but I hope it is useful.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Douglas
> 
> On Tue, 21 Feb 2017 at 09:37 Sascha Neinert <sascha.neinert at uni-koeln.de <mailto:sascha.neinert at uni-koeln.de>> wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> i did not manage to find much information about the resources that would be needed if one would want to provide an OMERO service - there are example production server set-ups so we could estimate the required IT resources (= hardware), but we wondered about the amount of time needed for running the system („human resources“): updates, patches, error handling, maybe some performance analysis, maybe some optimisations, maybe installing an extension or two…
> Any experiences on this would be most welcome!
> 
> Thank you, best regards,
> Sascha Neinert
> 
> 
> --
> Sascha Neinert
> CECAD RRZK IT Service
> Regional Computing Center (RRZK)
> University of Cologne
> Phone: +49-221 478-84051 <tel:+49%20221%2047884051> / +49-221 470-89624 <tel:+49%20221%2047089624>
> Mail: sascha.neinert at uni-koeln.de <mailto:sascha.neinert at uni-koeln.de>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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