Recommended Requirements for Small, Single Location Pharmacies
| Operating System | Red Hat Enterprise 8.x or Rocky Linux 8.8 |
| Processor / CPU | 3 GHz Quad-Core |
| Memory / RAM | 16 GB |
| Drive / Disk Space | 500 GB – 1 TB |
| Scanned Document Storage | 5 GB * # of Years This is in addition to the standard disk space. It can be a separate disk or a larger single disk. |
Recommended Requirements for Medium/Large/Multi-Site Pharmacies
| Operating System | Red Hat Enterprise 8.x or Rocky Linux 8.8 |
| Processor / CPU | 3 GHz Quad, Octa Cores |
| Memory / RAM | 32 GB + 100 MB * # of terminals |
| Drive / Disk Space | 1 – 4 TB |
| Scanned Document Storage | 5 GB * # of Sites * # of Years This is in addition to the standard disk space. It can be a separate disk or a larger single disk. |
The minimum and recommended requirements were last updated on 09/20/22.
It is the policy of Foundation Systems, Inc. that all pharmacies backup their data every day. This daily backup can be to any of the compatible destinations listed below.
Compatible Backup Destinations
- USB Flash Drives
- Hot-Swap Hard Drives
- SFTP or NFS Servers
- Samba / Windows Servers*
* These backup destinations are not officially supported by Foundation Systems, Inc. but are known to work. We have limited capabilities in assisting on issues with these backups as they generally involve another party/company that manages the destination. The exception is when using a Synology NAS purchased from us as a destination for these backups; see the next section for more details about Synology NAS devices.
We understand that computers aren’t 100% reliable and that a crashed server can be a huge issue, taking down your ability to fill prescriptions for a day or more. To help with this, we have created what we refer to as ‘mirroring’. This will make an on-the-fly, mirrored copy of data from one server to another as the data is entered. In the event of a hardware failure or operating system crash, the mirror server can normally be put into service as the primary server within minutes.
Mirroring does not help with human errors as the incorrectly entered data would be duplicated to the mirror server. Mirror servers are not to take the place of regular backups. It is recommended to not use mirroring if both the main and mirror server would reside within the same virtual host environment as mirroring is primarily for hardware failure.
Scanned documents & images are not included in the standard server backup commands. This partly is due to the amount of data they consume and because it is state and federal law that scanned hard copies cannot be used for legal reasons, and should only be used as a secondary resource. Pharmacies should still store all physical hard copies in a safe and secure location.
Having said that, we understand that these scanned documents and images can play a major role in speeding up verifying of prescriptions and so they should be backed up. We have developed and sold software that backs up these documents and images to a Synology NAS. Synology NAS devices are network-attached storage devices that have multiple hard drives for redundancy and can also back themselves up to additional USB or eSATA hard drives. We have tested multiple brands of NAS devices and have found Synology brand products to be the best combination of reliability and usability.
We do not recommend that scanned documents and images be kept for longer than 5-7 years. Any longer than this can cause the document and image backup to take too long, interfering with the operation of the use of our software.
Synology is a registered trademark of Synology, Inc. Their website is found here: http://www.synology.com/.
We’ve had lots of inquiries about running our software within a virtual environment and we’re happy to say that our software will work as long as the above requirements are met for the virtual machine created for our software.
Foundation Systems, Inc. technical support staff members are not certified nor trained in installing, configuring, or maintaining a virtual machine host environment. Therefore we cannot provide assistance when issues with the host environment arise. We do provide service for the virtual machine our software is operating on if the virtual machine is built to at least the minimum requirements specified above and the operating system is configured to our recommendations.
Please refer to the Recommended Requirements for Medium/Large/Multi-Site Pharmacies above for details on the resources to allocate to the FSI server.
Over the years, we have seen a hand full of issues come up when moving customers to a virtual environment. Here are the primary issues seen and their possible solutions:
| Issue / Question | Solution |
| USB or Parallel based printers connected directly to the server don’t work properly. | The use of network LPD or JetDirect-based printers is the most common way we set up printers anyway. |
| Modems don’t seem to work when “bound” to a virtual machine, causing problems when billing third parties and sending auto-faxed refill requests to doctors. | Internet connectivity is the only way to communicate with 3rd parties and FSI. 3rd parties do not accept modem claims anymore. Refill requests are more commonly sent via SureScripts or email, both requiring internet access. We’ve seen more and more doctors refuse to accept faxed refill requests as well. |
| USB Flash Drives don’t always work properly when “bound” to a virtual machine, causing problems with backups. | Proper virtual machine hosts should be able to take a ‘snapshot’ of the server; these should be taken regularly in place of physical media backups. We also recommend configuring network-based backups using either the NFS protocol or FTP. Backing up to Windows Shares usually works too but are not officially supported by our software as we’ve seen them be less reliable. |
| Is mirroring a viable option for virtual servers? | If both the primary and secondary servers are contained within the same virtual environment (same host/cluster / etc.), mirroring is far less effective. Our mirroring system was created to help in the event of hardware failure, not software failure. The ability to take and restore snapshots provides a much better alternative. If the secondary server is on a different virtual environment or is a physical server on the same network, mirroring is a viable option. |