Gabriele Monasterio Foundation

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Even though some of the medical research supported by Italy’s Gabriele Monasterio Foundation was cutting-edge, the system it used to store medical images wasn’t. The organization, based in Pisa, assists doctors and researchers across Italy and provides IT systems to help them with their work. However, the existing storage environment for image data was reaching its limitations and offered no way to increase capacity.

The challenge of storing image files, was becoming worse as the foundation purchased a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other diagnostic machines. Despite looking at file-compression techniques, the foundation’s IT team couldn’t find a solution that made the existing infrastructure sustainable.

The foundation wanted to implement a completely new storage infrastructure that offered greater capacity while keeping management simple. In addition, it wanted to reduce energy consumption to reduce costs and support its efforts to become an environmentally friendly organization. Sun won the contract over other leading vendors (IBM & HP) to replace the existing system, which was based on Sun E450 servers running Linux. Compared with the other vendors, the Sun solution was 40% less expensive than the alternatives. “Our requirements included reducing the costs associated with storage of the images, consolidating the existing archives and facilitating the management,” says Paolo Marcheschi, manager of the operating unit of computer science technologies at Gabriele Monasterio Foundation.

At the heart of the new Sun storage environment are Sun Fire X4150 and Sun Fire X4500 servers, both running the Solaris 10 Operating System. The foundation also switched its core database from PostgreSQL to MySQL 5.0 . Says Marcheschi, “Our application was capable of working with both, but the possibility of quick patching with MySQL guaranteed us a higher level of security. Sun’s constant support for MySQL also gave us great peace of mind.”

A local Sun partner (T.A.I. SRL) supported the installation and Sun Services provided a week-long training course so the foundation’s IT team had the skills to take full advantage of the new technology. As part of the same deal, the foundation also bought a series of workstations Sun Ultra 24 and a Sun Fire X2100 M2 server for its research laboratories .

According to the foundation, the Solaris ZFS file system has simplified administration, especially for the large image files generated by MRI scanners and other diagnostic machines. In addition, Marcheschi is delighted with the deployment of Solaris Containers, which support virtualization of the Solaris 10 OS. “Administration is much simpler through virtualization. Because of this approach, we don’t have to add physical machines for new projects, but assign virtual machines instead,” he says.

Today, administrators say they wouldn’t go back to using Linux. “The people who wanted to keep Linux now ask me to buy other Sun machines so they can take advantage of the new functions and ease of management with Solaris.” The Solaris 10 OS fair share scheduler (FSS), which controls the allocation of available CPU resources among workloads, is helping the IT team maximize the environment’s performance.

The medical research organization has configured the environment so that the Sun Fire X4150 servers, which run on Intel Xeon 5400 series processors, are at the system’s front end connected to workstations. These servers are fast, expandable, energy efficient, and ideal for database environments. The Sun Fire X4500 servers, which run on AMD Opteron processors, are at the back end storing the image data. The servers deliver high storage density and excellent throughput rates, making them extremely cost effective.

Each night, data from the Sun X4150 servers is transferred in batches to the Sun X4500 servers, which have a gross storage capacity of 24 TB. Comments Marcheschi, “We have already entered 21 million images into this system.” In the future, Marcheschi believes the foundation will deploy Sun SPARC Enterprise servers to take advantage of their 32 threads per core. He is also looking at Sun Ray thin clients to replace the organization’s existing PCs.