Serving large organisations

"IMS saves us hours of searching and sorting through pictures. The system is intuitive to use, works from both of our campuses and gives us excellent control over how images are used. The system is easy to use, very immediate, functional and innovative. The time saved and ease-of- access makes it great value for money."

Rebecca Bowerman
Anglia Ruskin University
Standalone IMS Server Installation

IMS Appliances

Standalone IMS Server Solutions

Owning your own IMS system is ideal for fast, local network access and for organisations needing in-house services for security or capacity reasons. By placing IMS on your own network, easy integration and greater storage expansion is available. Buying a standalone IMS is great value for money as you need only purchase the software once per server.

Various options exist for the installation process, as follows:

• Self-installation from a CD-ROM onto your own hardware
  
  

  Using a downloadable image and simple installation instructions, you can install IMS on your own system with optional remote help from Third Light.

• Ready-made server installed by our engineers
  
  

  If you prefer to have IMS pre-built and installed for you, we supply hardware and offer an installation service. We can either set up your new IMS system on your own network, or host it for you in our data center.

• Installation onto a virtual machine (VMWare, Parallels, Xen) - click here for further details

Whichever option you prefer, and whatever level of technical involvement you would like, we aim to offer you a suitable package. In all cases, your IMS system requires only minimal maintenance and will come complete with our automatic product updates package if you subscribe to our support and maintenance service.

For pricing information for purchasing IMS outright, please click here.

Installation details

Technical information for IT Staff

By default your IMS is a black box: you don't have to do anything involved if you just want to use our software. However, if you would like to know more about the IMS installation, we are happy to share some more details.

IMS is built upon Debian Linux, which has a reputation for great reliability and excellent quality control. Using Debian means we can offer a very wide range of hardware support, too - effectively, anything that is available in the latest 2.6.x kernel release.

To install IMS, you simply need to download a bootable CD-ROM image and burn it to a CDR. This is used to create your server, and an interactive installer helps you take care of the disk partitioning and network setup. We provide a very detailed guide including screengrabs of every step, so you do not need to be familiar with Linux as such.

IMS uses a MySQL database and Apache. For advanced users, you can make full use of your Linux installation by running other applications as well as IMS (for example, a Windows file share is often able to use the same storage as the image library). The entire Third Light application is in just one sub-directory, while its main file store - a deep set of folders referred to by the database - is in another partition. The main store can be NAS or SAN storage if you have it, and it's designed to be backed up easily.

Example Server Specifications

IMS can be installed on any Intel server (even a laptop) but normally, the server will be specified for fast image processing and mass storage. We are happy to offer advice on the exact specification of your server, to help match your needs or check compatibility of parts. (Ask us a question)

If you choose to purchase one of our servers, we offer long, trouble-free service backed by a warranty. We take pride in producing high-quality systems which will last and last. In the table below, two possible configurations are described for moderate to heavy users. Exact specifications and prices are constantly changing, so please do get in touch if you would like us to send you a quote.

Product image
Product type	Workgroup	High-End
Chassis	1U 19" Rackmount Floor-standing available	5U" Rackmount Floor-standing available
Power Supply	Single, fixed	Hot swap redundant pair
Hot Swap	Disks	Disks, fans, PSUs
Environmental	10C - 35C operating	10C - 35C operating
Processors	1 x Intel Xeon Dual Core	2 x Intel Xeon Quad Core
Memory	2GB ECC 667MHz	4GB+ ECC 800MHz
Network Interfaces	2 x 10/100/1000baseT	2 x 10/100/1000baseT
Hard drives	3 x 500GB 7.2k SATA	Up to 12 x 400GB 15k SCSI/SAS
Storage scheme	RAID 1 mirror with hot spare	RAID 5 array with hot spare
RAID cache	256MB on-board	512MB on-board
Operating system	Debian Linux v2.6	Debian Linux v2.6
Files capacity	Hundreds of thousands*	Millions*
Backups	Optional integration	Fully redundant pair of servers
Network Services	HTTP FTP SMTP SSH MySQL SOAP Web Services	HTTP HTTPS FTP SMTP SSH MySQL Serial Console SOAP Web Services
Firewall	Built-in, pre-configured	Built-in, pre-configured

* The number of pictures that can be stored is estimated, based on average image file sizes: exact numbers depend on file type and other factors such as compression, while the overall capacity of a busy server may also depend on how many simultaneous users access the IMS service.

Caring for the environment

Computer equipment is a growing source of power usage in the world. Third Light has made a corporate responsibility commitment to deploy power-saving servers and to operate a green data centre. We will select appropriate hardware and minimise the power consumption of your servers using intelligent software management as part of this commitment.