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

Fri Mar 10 15:07:00 GMT 2017

Hi Sascha,

I look after a server on the same user number scale and around 20TB of
data - and yes for normal operation of OMERO a few hours a month (or
less!) is totally feasible.

Once you have alerting in place for any hardware related issues, and
monitoring of the backups system, the only administrative intervention the
OMERO server I look after requires is around upgrades or hardware issues.

The upgrades only take in the region of 30 minutes a month, and most of
that time is dumping the database. (This can be made quicker too, with a
multi-threaded database dump - but not something I’ve used yet in anger).

You’ll definitely want to factor in the usual sysadmin stuff such as
testing your backups, dealing with any unexpected hardware failures, time
required for planning migration to different hardware platforms if you
scale larger than you were expecting, or your hardware hits end of life
etc.

So to some extent the time to support depends very much where the line is
drawn between looking after OMERO and looking after the infrastructure
required to provide OMERO.

All the best,

Kenny

--

Kenneth Gillen

OME System Administrator

Wellcome Trust Centre for Gene Regulation & Expression
School of Life Sciences
CTIR 2
University of Dundee
Dow Street
Dundee  DD1 5EH
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0) 1382 388797

http://www.twitter.com/openmicroscopy

From:  ome-users <ome-users-bounces at lists.openmicroscopy.org.uk> on behalf
of Sascha Neinert <sascha.neinert at uni-koeln.de>
Reply-To:  OME User Support List <ome-users at lists.openmicroscopy.org.uk>
Date:  Friday, 10 March 2017 14:54
To:  OME User Support List <ome-users at lists.openmicroscopy.org.uk>
Subject:  Re: [ome-users] Resources needed for providing an OMERO service

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>
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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