Orchard Device Engine Hardware Requirements

The CLIENT will provide:

• Block and Slide Printers, as needed
• Bar Code Scanners, as needed
• Label Printers, as needed

Orchard will provide:

• All serial port expansion cards, hubs, and connectors necessary to establish the proposed system network and all interfaces listed in the executed Purchase Agreement and subsequent Statement of Work.

• An SSD storage array is preferred for any Orchard database server deployment, but may be required for intensive usage systems.
• Random Access Memory (RAM) must be statically allocated to the workstation and/or server. Orchard’s applications are RAM-intensive. As such, dynamic allocation can, and will, cause issues within the system if it is forced to wait for memory allocation.
• The number of dedicated workstations for Instrument Interfaces is subject to change based on the number of instrument interfaces deployed.
• If automated faxing is deployed, a dedicated fax workstation utilizing analog fax lines is required to fax directly from the Orchard application.
• The use of Docker and other containerization technologies for deploying Orchard Software products is not recommended, as they do not align with Orchard Software best practices for system stability, performance, and supportability.

The following diagram depicts the data flow of the Orchard Device Engine solution. Please note that this is an example diagram and may not include all components of your deployment.

The following specifications are Orchard Software’s recommendation for optimal performance of the Orchard Device Engine (ODE) workstation for laboratory analyzer integration.

Notes on recommended hardware deployment:

• At least one ODE workstation should reside at each geographical location where devices are present.
• Connections between ODE and instruments often utilize TCP socket connections that remain open even when the instruments are idle. If these connections are improperly terminated, the instruments will lose connectivity and may require manual intervention to reestablish it. Network hardware with active connection management including routers and firewalls often improperly terminates these connections when the instruments are idle due to idle timeout features. It is recommended that the network path between ODE and instruments runs exclusively through hardware that does not have idle timeout features unless they can be disabled. 
• Each ODE workstation should be assigned a static IP address.
• Windows Firewall should be configured with inbound and outbound rules to allow ODE to communicate with network devices.
• ODE may run under the local service account if it is only communicating with devices via TCP, but it will require a network service account so that permissions can be assigned if it is communicating with instrumentation or document printers that exchange files over a shared folder.
• The number of ODE workstations may be increased for scalability and load balancing. 

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