DataBase Administration Case Study
The Challenge
Anchor Therapeutics is a pre–clinical stage drug discovery and development company focused on creating new treatments for regenerative medicine, diabetes, inflammation and cancer. Their web–based Lab information Management System (LIMS) plays a key role in the collection and organization of their mission–critical research data. They wanted to ensure minimum downtime and data loss in the event of a system or hardware failure.
The Solution
Anchor required a comprehensive development–to–production upgrade plan and disaster recovery strategy. First, we assembled our team: a Wi–Design project manager, a System and Hardware Administrator, in–house scientists and LIMS vendor developers.
Next, we created detailed standard operating procedures for the various phases of system maintenance, upgrades and disaster recovery testing. Team members were assigned to specific tasks as appropriate.
Wi–Design’s solution focused on three types of measures: preventative, detective and corrective.
Preventative Measures
A production clone serves as a testing environment. All application and system upgrades are first applied and reviewed thoroughly in the test environment before they are performed on the production server.
Detective Measures
Regular system maintenance and optimization keeps the production server operating efficiently, reducing the likelihood of a disruptive event.
Corrective Measures
Routine disaster recovery drills give Anchor confidence that, should an event or disaster occur, the system would be restored in a timely manner with minimal data loss.
The Wi–Design project manager, Maria Picone, coordinates and orchestrates all routine tasks as specified by the standard operating procedures.