Digital stability and innovation

By combining Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Hana and back-up software from Red Hat's partner Bacula Systems, Molecular Health has built a high-performance, cost-effective solution that helps physicians develop personalized cancer therapies. The company also simplified the operation and management of its IT department.

Based on comprehensive data collection, Molecular Health, a leader in computational biomedicine, provides comprehensive medical and therapeutic services to a wide range of customers - including physicians, hospitals, research networks, laboratories, regulatory agencies and pharmaceutical companies.

The Molecular Health Guide (MH Guide) data analytics product supports cancer treatment decision making with a highly reliable knowledge base, Dataome.

This database contains curated biomedical data from 26 million scientific and medical publications, as well as data on 273,000 drug interactions, 7000 biomarkers of drug safety and efficacy, 85,000 gene variants, 56,000 drugs, 126,000 clinical trials, 270,000 protein interactions, and nine million patient drug safety records.

Open Hybrid Cloud

Through a cloud-based interface tailored to the needs of different audiences - for example, clinical interpretation and recording of genetic alterations during next-generation sequencing (NGS) in laboratories and hospitals - the MH Guide connects individual patient data with this body of relevant biomedical knowledge.

Stability and consistency of the operating system environment as well as the back-up solution play a critical role in long-running batch processing jobs as well as data storage for Molecular Health's complex IT infrastructure, including the cloud environment.

"We use a variety of processor and memory configurations for physical and virtual servers"

says Ralf Stecher, Senior Database Administrator at Molecular Health in Heidelberg.

"Depending on the dynamic application profile, we use different databases such as PostgreSQL or SAP Hana and run different cluster setups for genomic interpretation. All these processes need a reliable system foundation."

Molecular Health had initially deployed Hana on Suse Linux Enterprise Server to process clinical and medical data. Having experienced issues from time to time with availability and ensuring consistent operation, Molecular Health sought a new solution for its Hana environment that would provide greater stability and simplify operations and management for the company's small IT department.

Due to its specialization in precision medicine and its operation of a heterogeneous IT system landscape, Molecular Health considered a variety of different decision criteria when selecting the solution.

After extensive testing with existing data, the company decided to replace its Suse solution with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Hana and Bacula Enterprise Edition, open source backup software from Red Hat's partner Bacula Systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Hana

"We chose Red Hat because our testing showed it to be the most technically mature, stable and user-friendly operating system"

says Stecher.

"For example, we can run Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Hana on a server with 80 CPUs without any problems."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Hana combines the reliability, scalability, and performance of the world's leading enterprise Linux platform with the robust in-memory database Hana.

Based on these technologies, Molecular Health has built a high-performance, open environment that can ensure the necessary consistency and security of its mission-critical data analytics and therapy suggestions.

New data warehouse improves support for clinical analysis

Server stability and security are critical to the IT environment that hosts and manages Molecular Health's patient data.

With the new Red Hat and Bacula solution, the company can ensure the mission-critical reliability and stability that is important to them, both for current use scenarios, such as clinical decision-making, and for new use cases, such as collecting, integrating, and analyzing patient molecular results from peer-reviewed publications.

For example, the MH Guide provides an overview of potentially effective treatment options and provides assessments of whether they may be associated with higher risk or adverse side effects and reactions.

It also provides patient-specific, clinically relevant data and treatment options - including clinical and evidence-based treatment option reports, clinical trials, and drug interaction data and other supplemental information.

"Red Hat and Bacula solutions provide an organized and stable operating system with significantly lower maintenance requirements"

says Stecher.

"The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Hana and Bacula Enterprise Edition has significantly increased our efficiency and saved us a lot of time."

To ensure the required availability, the MH Guide needs a back-up support that offers the possibility to backup data on different media such as hard disks or tapes.

With Bacula Enterprise Edition, Molecular Health can quickly back up its network file systems (NFS) as well as its Windows and Linux physical and virtual servers.

In addition, Molecular Health uses this solution to remotely monitor and control data backup at the company's other sites to ensure that users can restore data at any time and that company-wide backup policies are followed.

This allows Molecular Health to recover its data effectively, faster and more reliably than before, when needed.

Lower IT operating costs

The Red Hat and Bacula solution will enable Molecular Health to modernize its IT environment, reducing ongoing operational and other associated costs.

In the early days, R&D staff used SAP Hana on servers with 128 CPUs and as much main memory as possible, but these highly integrated servers were very expensive to run. Currently, the company mainly uses servers with 24 to 30 CPUs.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Hana, combined with Red Hat Virtualization and Bacula Enterprise Edition, has proven to be an efficient, easy-to-manage, and highly stable operating system for Molecular Health.

This powerful solution enables the company to further support a growing number of patients, professionals and healthcare organizations with up-to-date, relevant data and analytics.

About Molecular Health

Molecular Health is a precision computational medicine company with a focus on data science and artificial intelligence to improve decision making for healthcare organizations.

The company's offerings are based on the collection, curation, integration and analysis of large amounts of biomedical and drug discovery data combined with novel technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

For more than a decade, the company has developed Dataome, a unique and systematically curated system that links clinical molecular and drug data with proprietary analytics.

Standalone or in combination with customer data, Dataome enables actionable insights at the molecular level. This enables physicians and patients to make better diagnosis or treatment decisions and supports pharmaceutical and healthcare organizations in discovering and developing compounds, optimizing clinical trials, and positioning drugs.

In addition, the likelihood of success in clinical development of drug candidates and the likelihood of approval can be accurately predicted, improving the quality of decision-making in prioritizing studies and allocating resources and investments.