Re: Request for information from institutions with Archiver Appliance deployments

["Konrad, Martin" <konrad@frib.msu.edu>]

Hi Michael,
> Diamond Light Source is looking into archivers to replace our Channel
> Archiver. I wanted to reach to anyone who has deployed the EPICS
> Archiver Appliance at their institution.
We replaced our old channel archiver by the Archiver Appliance for NSCL.
Archiver Appliance can also proxy requests to the old channel archiver
making the transition easier. We wanted to get rid of channel archiver
completely so we asked Cosylab to write a converter for us. I think this
is easier to maintain in the long run.

We are also committed to use Archiver Appliance for FRIB.

> If so, I was looking, for example, for information on performance
> testing and discussions about deployment.
It's always hard to provide useful performance numbers but performance
should not be an issue for 100,000 PVs. It can take some time from
starting the appliance until all channels are connected, though (in our
case ~20 minutes).

> Any information regarding the deployment would be very useful, too.
Our deployment is very similar to the virtual test environment you can 
find on the website [1]. We use similar Puppet code to deploy our 
production system. Our production system has 128 GB of RAM which is much 
more than we currently need for NSCL. The amount of RAM you need depends 
a) on the buffer sizes and b) on the amount of RAM you want to use for a 
RAM disk.

HTH,

Martin

[1] https://slacmshankar.github.io/epicsarchiver_docs/installguide.html

-- 
Martin Konrad
Control System Engineer
Facility for Rare Isotope Beams
Michigan State University
640 South Shaw Lane
East Lansing, MI 48824-1321, USA
Tel. 517-908-7253
Email: konrad@frib.msu.edu