“Red Hat and Bacula’s solution offers an organized and stable operating system with markedly lower maintenance overhead,” said Mr. Stecher. “Combining Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA and Bacula Enterprise has significantly increased our efficiency and saves us considerable time,”
RALF STECHER
SENIOR DATABASE ADMINISTRATOR, MOLECULAR HEALTH
Overview
Molecular Health is a computational bio-medicine company focused on big-data curation, integration and analytics to enable precision medicine. The company provides doctors and institutes with comprehensive medical and therapeutic services. The different software solutions allow actionable insights for physicians, hospitals, research networks, commercial labs, regulators and pharma companies The company previously used a SUSE Linux platform to support its SAP HANA environment for its clinical data warehouse but faced availability issues. By deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA, and backup software from Bacula Systems, a Red Hat partner, Molecular Health gained a high-performance, cost-efficient solution that helps doctors select individual therapies in cancer. In addition, the company simplified operations and management for its relatively small IT department.
- FAST FACTS
Industry: Biotechnology
Location of headquarters: Heidelberg, Germany
Size: Around 100 employees
Benefits:
- Deployed highly stable, scalable, and reliable platform for its data warehouse, supporting clinical analysis and decisions
- Gained robust, reliable data backup and restoration
- Reduced IT operational costs using open source software in consolidated hardware environment
Massive Data Warehouse Creates Stability and Management Challenges
Molecular Health, a leading IT company in the field of precision medicine, provides doctors and institutes with comprehensive medical and therapeutic services. The platform is the basis of its analytical product Molecular Health Guide® (MH Guide) for decision support in cancer treatment based on a highly reliable knowledge database – Dataome®. It hosts the company’s continuously expanding database of curated biomedical data from 26 million scientific and medical publications, 273,000 drug-to-drug interactions, 7,000 biomarker facts for drug efficacy and safety, 85,000 gene variants, 56,000 drugs, 126,000 clinical trials, 270,000 protein interactions, and 9 million patient medical records for drug safety, among other data. MH Guide connects individual patient data with this entire body of relevant biomedical knowledge and provides a cloud-based interface tailored to the needs of various target groups—such as analysis, clinical interpretation, and recording genetic changes in next-generation sequencing (NGS) at laboratories and hospitals.
Ensuring the stability and consistency of the operating system and backup environments is key to completing long-running batch processing and storage of Molecular Health’s complex system landscape serving the special need of medical research as well as productive cloud environments.
“We use a diverse range of processor and memory configurations for physical and virtual servers”, said Ralf Stecher, senior database administrator at Molecular Health. “Depending on the dynamic application profile, we use various databases like PostGres or SAP Hana and also run various cluster setups for genomic interpretation, and all of this needs a reliable system backbone”
Molecular Health had used SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to process clinical and medical data. However, due to occasional availability issues and challenges with consistent operation, the company sought out a new, reliable solution for its SAP HANA environment that would offer greater stability and simplify operations and management for its small IT department.
Enterprise Solution Supports Robust Data Management and Backup
Due to specializing in precision medicine and operating a heterogeneous IT system environment, Molecular Health considered many criteria to select the most suitable solution. After comprehensive testing using existing data, the company chose to replace its SUSE solution with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA and Bacula Enterprise, an open source-based backup software from Bacula Systems, a Red Hat partner.
“We chose Red Hat because our tests showed that it was the most technically proven, stable, and user-friendly operating system,” said Ralf Stecher. “For instance, we can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA on a server with 80 CPUs without experiencing any issues.”
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA combines the reliability, scalability, and performance of the leading enterprise Linux platform with SAP HANA’s robust in-memory database. The company used these solutions to build a high-performance, open environment that offers consistency and security for its critical data analysis and therapy proposals.
Greater Stability and Reliability
Server stability and security are critical to Molecular Health’s IT environment that hosts and manages pseudonymized genomic data. With the new Red Hat and Bacula solution, Molecular Health can ensure critical reliability and stability for current application scenarios based on its platform — such as treatment decision support processes — as well as new services focusing on tasks like integrating, and analyzing molecular patient results from peer-reviewed publications.
For example, MH Guide provides an overview of potentially effective treatment options and potentialrisk of undesired side effects and reactions. Furthermore, patient-specific, clinically relevant data, and evidence-based treatment options, clinical studies, and supplementary data, such as interactions between medications are provided.
“Red Hat and Bacula’s solution offers an organized and stable operating system with markedly lower maintenance overhead,” said Mr. Stecher. “Combining Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA and Bacula Enterprise has significantly increased our efficiency and saves us considerable time,” said Mr. Stecher.
Robust Data Backup and Recovery
To ensure necessary availability, MH Guide requires backup support that include the option to secure data on different kinds of media, such as disks or tapes. With Bacula Enterprise, Molecular Health can quickly back up its network file systems (NFS), as well as its physical and virtual Windows and Linux servers. In addition, Molecular Health uses this solution to remotely monitor and control data backup at its other locations, ensuring users can recover data at any time and that company-wide data backup policies are followed.
As a result, Molecular Health can effectively recover data on demand, faster and more reliably than before.
Lower IT operational Costs
With the Red Hat and Bacula solution, Molecular Health can streamline its IT environment to reduce ongoing operational expenses and other related costs.
Previously, the company’s R&D employees used SAP HANA on servers with 128 CPUs and the largest main memory possible. These highly integrated servers were very costly to operate. Now, the company primarily uses servers with just 24 to 30 CPUs.
The annual subscription models of solutions from Red Hat and Bacula provide more flexibility than proprietary vendors with costly lock-in. Without data volume-related charges, Molecular Health can more easily predict operating costs for future IT activities.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA, combined with Bacula Enterprise, has proven to be an efficient, easy-to-manage, and highly stable operating system for Molecular Health. Thanks to this powerful solution, the company is positioned for continued growth.
About Molecular Health
Molecular Health is a computational biomedicine company focused on big-data curation, integration and analytics to enable precision medicine. The company has developed Dataome®, a top quality-curated, interoperable technology system comprising a large set of databases and analytics that allow the integration and referencing of clinico-molecular drug and disease data to generate novel and actionable insights on drug outcomes for stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem. These include physicians, hospitals, research networks, commercial labs, regulators and pharma companies. The company is compliant to all relevant regulatory certification and accreditation standards. Molecular Health’s scientific and commercial teams are based in Heidelberg, Germany, and Boston, MA, USA.
For more information, visit www.molecularhealth.com
