Molecular Health Adopted Bacula Enterprise Edition

Benefits gained: 

• Deployed highly stable, scalable, and reliable platform for its data warehouse, supporting clinical analysis and decisions
• Gained robust, reliable backup and restoration
• Reduced IT operational costs using open source software in consolidated hardware environment

Molecular Health GmbH, a biomedicine company, uses big data analytics to provide medical and therapeutic services.

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 SAP HANA certified backup software from Bacula Systems SA and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA, it gained a solution that helps doctors create individualized cancer therapies. In addition, the company simplified operations and management for its IT department.

Molecular Health provides medical and therapeutic services to a variety of customers including physicians, hospitals, research networks, labs, regulators, and pharmaceutical companies using big data insight.

Its data analytic product, Molecular Health Guide (MH Guide), supports decision-making related to cancer treatments with a highly reliable knowledge database, Dataome. This database hosts curated biomedical data from 26 million scientific and medical publications, as well as data on 273,000 drug interactions, 7,000 biomarkers for drug efficacy and safety, 85,000 gene variants, 56,000 drugs, 126,000 clinical trials, 270,000 protein interactions, 9 million patient medical records for drug safety, and more.

MH Guide connects individual patient data with this body of relevant biomedical knowledge through a cloud-based interface tailored to the needs of various target groups – such as clinical interpretation and recording genetic changes in next-generation sequencing (NGS) at laboratories and hospitals. Ensuring the stability and consistency of its OS and backup environments is key to completing long-term batch processing and storage for Molecular Health’s complex IT environment, including its cloud environment.

“We use a diverse range of processor and memory configurations for physical and virtual servers,” said Ralf Stecher, senior database administrator, Molecular Health. “Depending on the dynamic application profile, we use various databases like PostgreSQL or SAP HANA and run various cluster setups for genomic interpretation. All of these processes need a reliable system foundation.“

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 solution for its SAP HANA environment that would offer greater stability and simplify operations and management for its small IT department.

Enterprise Solution Supports Data Management and Backup
Due to specializing in precision medicine and operating a heterogeneous IT system environment, Molecular Health considered many criteria to select a solution. After testing using existing data, the company chose to replace its SUSE solution with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA and Bacula Enterprise Edition, backup software from Bacula Systems, a Red Hat partner.

Bacula Enterprise Edition’s reliability and flexibility combined with Red Hat meant that Molecular Health were able to create an open environment that offers the necessary backup and data recovery capability levels, together with consistency and security for its critical data analysis and treatment proposals.

Data Warehouse Improves Support for Clinical Analysis Greater Stability and Scalability
Server stability and security are critical to the IT environment that hosts and manages Molecular Health’s patient data. With the Red Hat and Bacula solution, the company can ensure critical reliability and stability for current application scenarios-such as clinical decision-making processes as well as new use cases, such as collecting, integrating, and analyzing molecular patient results from peer-reviewed publications. For example, MH Guide provides an overview of potentially effective treatment options, including potential risk of undesired side effects and reactions. It also provides patient-specific, clinically relevant data and treatment options-including reports on clinical and evidence-based treatment options, clinical studies, as well medication interaction data and other supplementary data.

“Red Hat and Bacula’s solution offers an organized and stable OS with markedly lower maintenance overhead,” said Stecher. “Combining Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA and Bacula Enterprise Edition has increased our efficiency and saves us considerable time.“

Backup and Recovery
To ensure necessary availability, MH Guide requires backup support that includes the option to secure data on different media types, such as disks or tapes. With Enterprise Edition, it can backup its NFS, as well as its physical and virtual Windows and Linux servers. In addition, it uses this solution to remotely monitor and control backup at its other locations, ensuring users can recover data at any time and that company-wide backup policies are followed. As a result, it can recover data on demand, faster and more reliably.

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 maximum main memory, but these highly integrated servers were very costly to operate. The company primarily uses servers with just 24-30 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.

Initial Success Builds Confidence in Future Opportunities
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA, combined with Red Hat Virtualization and Enterprise Edition, has proven to be an efficient and stable OS for Molecular Health. Thanks to this solution, the company is positioned to continue supporting an increasing number of healthcare patients, professionals, and organizations with timely, relevant data and analysis.

Case study