Thermo LabSystems announces deal with IBM Life Sciences group to improve storage of electronic records in life sciences
Thermo LabSystems has announced that it is developing, with IBM a joint solution to better support the global life science community in managing, archiving, and restoring analytical data for the long term.
The organisations will work together to integrate Thermo's eRecordManager analytical data archival system with IBM's Tivoli storage manager and on joint marketing activities.
The goal of this project is to develop a comprehensive enterprise-wide hierarchical storage solution to meet the challenge of making analytical data highly accessible and searchable, while minimising the cost of long-term storage. Improved access and archival of analytical instrument data ultimately assists life sciences organisations and institutions to make new lead discoveries, terminate flawed projects earlier in the process, and make more informed management decisions during, for example, the development lifecycle of new drugs and chemicals.
eRecordManager and Tivoli storage manager in combination will offer an end-to-end solution from the receipt and normalization of the original instrument raw data, through indexing for ease of searching, to storage on (and migration to) appropriate media.
eRecordManager offers science-based industries unique functionality for addressing record-keeping requirements in accordance with regulatory protocols such as the US Food and Drug Administration's 21 CFR Part 11 ruling on electronic signatures and records.
Featuring a powerful library of converters for over 180 different data file formats, eRecordManager translates instrument data into a platform-neutral format called GAML (Generalised Analytical Markup Language), based on XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language), which frees the data from reliance on the original instrument software for its retrieval.
IBM Tivoli storage manager protects an organisation's data from hardware failures and other errors by storing back-up and archive copies of data in online or offline storage.
IBM Tivoli storage manager scales to support multiple peta-bytes of medical data, it also balances among the need for data accessibility, long-term data retention and protection while managing total costs.
"Our mutual customers are looking for integrated solutions that will help ease the storage and retrieval of ever-increasing volumes of laboratory data," said Jamie Coffin, vice president of sales, IBM Life Sciences.
"This unique collaboration based on IBM's robust, scalable infrastructure technology and Thermo LabSystems's data archival and knowledge-management systems will address the needs of our customers for comprehensive laboratory information storage management solutions.
He added, "We are very eager to bring to market this timely and relevant solution with such a strong business partner as Thermo LabSystems." Commenting on the agreement, Marc Casper, president of the Life and Laboratory Sciences sector of Thermo Electron stated, "With eRecordManager's unique data conversion functionality in combination with Tivoli Storage Manager's powerful and scalable data storage capabilities, we are looking forward to helping customers optimize benefits from genuine enterprise-wide knowledge management in a cost-effective way.
