Red Hat Announces Health IT Infrastructure Improvements

June 27, 2017 - Red Hat announced that Molecular Health deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA to support its new precision medicine analytics platform, Molecular Health GuideTM (MH Guide), helping the tool be better integrated into health IT infrastructure.

MH Guide provides healthcare organizations with a knowledge base of pre-interpreted information from millions of medical publications. This knowledge base gives clinicians access to more data so they can make more accurate diagnoses.

The guide is also combined with a backup and recovery solution from Bacula Systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA is available for on-premise or off-premise cloud environments and provides additional deployment choice for highly scalable, big data applications.

“Molecular Health sought to deliver better therapy development and improve its medical research capabilities, to quickly retrieve data as requested by applications, more easily manage business-critical workloads and work from more efficient, innovative technologies,” Red Hat Vice President of Partners and Alliances Petra Heinrich said in a statement.

Molecular Health faced challenges processing and calculating large volumes of data. Healthcare professionals rely on the database to do their jobs and accurately diagnose patients, which makes server stability a large motivator behind the company seeking a more advanced solution.

MH Guide operates in the cloud and requires periodic backups. It also requires the ability to store data on different kinds of media like disks and tapes.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA is a scalable platform that gives Molecular Health a more future-proof platform to continue collecting and processing data for healthcare organizations to use and consult.

Molecular Health Vice President of IT Operations Stefan Fuss says that the company has more confidence in its long-term, computing-intensive workloads.

Red Hat also announced last week the availability of Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, which is an open source hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution.

The solution aims to use hyper-convergence to help organizations with multiple locations manage and maintain their IT infrastructure from a single location. Many organizations have smaller locations with limited space, such as smaller branch practices and specialist offices, that do not have the space to deploy data center capabilities on-premises.

“Organizations need to be able to offer the same infrastructure services in remote and branch offices as they run in their datacenter,” said Red Hat. “However, remote and branch offices can have unique challenges: less space and power/cooling, and fewer (or no) technical staff on-site. Organizations in this situation need powerful services, integrated on a single server that can scale out.”

The hyper-converged solution integrates computer and storage together on a single server, which allows it to operate with a low footprint. The centrally managed tool cuts back on long-term IT infrastructure costs because each location does not require management staff on site performing maintenance and trouble shooting.

“The integrated systems market continues to grow with hyperconverged platforms becoming a larger and larger portion therein,” Enterprise Strategy Group Senior Analyst Terri McClure said in a statement. “Remote and branch office installations can be challenging for enterprises to equip from an IT perspective and are well-suited for hyperconverged offerings.”

“More and more customers are looking for a hyperconverged solution which can address their remote site challenges as well as lay the groundwork for software-defined future directions.”

The open source infrastructure stack helps organizations avoid vendor lock-in and lets entities take advantage of the faster innovation offered by open source communities.

Red Hat HCI uses the company’s virtualization platform, along with software-defined storage, to integrate compute and storage infrastructure. The solution is built on a suite of components including the following:

• Red Hat Virtualization: Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-powered enterprise virtualization platform.
• Red Hat Gluster Storage: Scalable software-defined storage that can be converged on the same hardware as Red Hat Virtualization hosts, removing the need for additional compute infrastructures and simplifying deployment.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Linux platform that offers a stable and reliable foundation.
• Ansible by Red Hat: Deployment and management built on the agentless open source IT automation framework, providing automated installation and configuration from a central point.

Healthcare organizations interested in cutting back on costs and IT staff for remote locations should consider a hyper-converged environment. Entities are experiencing much more data coming in and need a future-proof way to store and access clinical data.