Scalability
What do we mean when we talk about scalability?
Getting to know a company, their products and their people represents a very significant investment in your time, effort, money and people - which is all a risk when you are thinking of adding new technologies and products. Often we find customers try to reduce their risk by making a small investment by purchasing the minimum to ensure that the products or services deliver to your specific needs.
But what about the future when you want to expand the number of analysts processing and reviewing data?
What happens when you want to have the data processed as soon as it has been produced by your instruments?
What happens when you want to add more instruments to the automated processing environment - Will it be able to scale to handle the increase in sample numbers?
What happens when you need to deliver your results and reports to a number of different scientists who may well be on different continents or site facilities?
What happens when you have a range of different workflows but want consistency across how you information is handled, reported and published in its final format?
Does having a single or some reduced number of software packages not reduce your hidden internal costs and productivity?
These are some aspects of what we mean; when we talk about scalability.
Being able to have defined workflows which are unique and yet consistent in how reports are created, and the level of supported fields and metadata types, is often achieved in one software package only to be broken in another. Analytical Studio Professional and the Framework on which it is built can be customized to deliver fully contained workflows and functionality yet using common elements, such as report output formats, fields and types. This delivers to your scientists a way of working that is sympathetic to what they need to be successful and yet does not limit your ability to create the right output in the right format and ensure that it goes to the right place.
"The freedom to choose and make a selection of the best instrumentation for the job as well as having your data processed, presented and reported in consistent way is something that is often extremely appealing."
This scenario has its challenges though, which are fortunately easily solved. Consider that it takes a finite time to translate the original raw vendors format into a different consistent format, plus the time it takes to do all the processing and reporting. Now add in the time for any reprocessing of your batches of samples plus the lack of response from your computer while it is busy working, then you will typically find yourself waiting around and wasting more time than you feel appropriate.
Analytical Studio Express and Analytical Studio Express Instrument Agent, both work together to automate all these tasks, plus any other automatic scripts, that you want to have made without a scientist or person needing to be involved. All processing is made on a dedicated computer or series of computers so that as soon as the data becomes available, it is picked up, translated, processed, reported and even published without you having to wait around or even suffer from an unresponsive PC. As is typical, most instruments will run around the clock often producing thousands of datasets per day, so irrespective of when you work, the results should always be available and ready for your review. Indeed, this can be so effective, that we have found that it can save you between 60 and 80% of your day for every 1000 samples processed.
There are practical limits to how many samples can be processed on a single computer, without thinking about how many instruments created this amount of data in the first place. So what happens when this limit is exceeded?
Analytical Studio Express has been engineered to be completely scalable depending on your processing needs. If you need additional processing power, then all that is needed is to add additional computers into the self balancing processing pool or farm. In practice this approach provides you with an extremely flexible way to make a high performance processing environment without the need to invest in ultra expensive computer hardware. Talk to us for further advice and information.
As the number of instruments, samples and your customers increases, so does complexity of having to manage this ever increasing volume of data, results and reports. Indeed the more files and data that are produced the harder it can become to quickly find and locate the latest data to review in the long list of subdirectories that are typically present on your file shares. Analytical Studio Repository is designed to integrate into your workflow, providing a way to quickly search and retrieve your results, raw data, processed data, reports or any other facet of the stored information pool that is available within the database or connected systems. If you need the database extending to incorporate information from your other databases, or other sources, this can also be achieved by extending the table design which we are happy to implement with you.
Typically as the number of instruments and samples increases, so does the number of people who need to interact with the results.
Analytical Studio Repository is a product that provides a rapid way to organize and manage the volumes of data and results that are produced by your analytical systems that is part of the entire solution that is aimed at large scale sample analysis and result management and information dissemination.
Closing comments
Scalability is a large topic which we are happy to discuss in more detail with you. We have carefully designed and engineered our products to be scalable where needed based on extensive experience in building large scale informatics solutions. Talk to us to understand how we can work with you to implement a solution that can deliver to your needs.