How The Server Labs helped a global pharmaceutical research organisation to modernise their approach to business continuity
The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) plays a critical role in ensuring the sustainable management of Atlantic Tuna stocks. When ICCAT needed a scalable, secure and manageable cloud infrastructure, they sought out the cloud architecture experts, The Server Labs.
The organisation is a global leader in pharmaceutical research and the development of medications that prevent, alleviate and treat disease.
Their research work uses extensive datasets of sensitive patient data and clinical trial results. They collaborate with scientists from around the world, who have access to the data for the duration of their research projects.
Their data is, in many cases, irreplaceable, and in all cases essential to the continued operation of the business.
The organisation has to be certain that their data is secure, that only those with authorisation can access it, and that in the case of a system failure or outage, they can recover their data fast, in order to continue their essential operations.
They were operating a very strict access control regime, managed through iRODS. Researchers’ access to clinical study data was granted through LDAP, and Rsync preserved all data attributes. Rsync and Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) were used for backup.
Whilst security was tightly managed, the organisation wanted to ensure that they had the most effective backup and recovery strategy, so that in the case of a loss of data, they could resume operations with as little downtime as possible.
Not all their data is of equal importance when it comes to recovery, so they recognised that they needed a strategy that applied different approaches to different types of data. They wanted to create a data hierarchy and establish a recovery plan to ensure that the most important data is recovered first and fastest.
Whilst security was tightly managed, the organisation wanted to ensure that they had the most effective backup and recovery strategy, so that in the case of a loss of data, they could resume operations with as little downtime as possible.
Not all their data is of equal importance when it comes to recovery, so they recognised that they needed a strategy that applied different approaches to different types of data. They wanted to create a data hierarchy and establish a recovery plan to ensure that the most important data is recovered first and fastest.
The pharmaceutical company wanted a review of their existing security and backup strategy from an independent expert – and approached The Server Labs (TSL).
Under the leadership of CTO Paul Parsons, the TSL team carried out a detailed review and designed a new HPC cluster backup and recovery scheme that would address the client's security and backup needs.
The Server Labs design includes:
The solution meets all the client's needs:
The solution meets all the client's needs:
This organisation's work makes a real impact on healthcare, and we are proud to play a part in helping to enable and protect their valuable research data.
Chief Technnology Officer at The Server Labs
You can download the case study in PDF format from here
You can download the case study in PDF format from here
