Databases at the HTBC
We support two main databases; A cheminformatics database from Accelrys (ORACLE 9i) and an image storage and analysis database from Molecular Devices (ORACLE 11g).
1. The High-throughput Database stores all the information from the compound libraries and links this information together with the results from screening. The cheminformatics system we installed is from Accelrys (formerly MDL Information systems and contains the following products:
(A) MDL ISIS Enterprise Edition, (datasheet) including, ISIS/Draw (datasheet), ISIS/Base,(datasheet), ISIS for Excel,(datasheet), ISIS/Host with Oracle Gateway, Chime Pro/Chemscape Server, developer tools, ISIS ADK Pro, ISIS/Host API, ISIS Open Gateway & Toolkit, Relational Chemistry Server, and MDL Draw Enterprise Edition.
(B) MDL® Cheshire (datasheet) Enterprise Edition, a software suite of chemical structure analysis, calculation, and manipulation functions accessible from MDL's ISIS software system.
(C) MDL® Assay Explorer (datasheet) Enterprise Edition, , a customizable biological data management system to capture, analyze, and store experimental results.
(D) MDL® ChemBio AE; (datasheet) ChemBio AE provides an integrated retrieval and
viewing solution for chemical and biological data, and chemical registration services.
(E) MDL® Plate Manager (datasheet) Enterprise Edition, a central repository for plate and sample information that integrates with MDL data management and chemical registration tools.
(F) MDL® Report Manager, (datasheet) a reporting tool that uses ISIS chemical structure searching to integrate and extract data from multiple databases into pre-formatted reports.
2. The Molecular Devices MetaXpress image acquisition software captures and stores image files from the ImageXpress Micro during high-content screens. The images are stored in the MDCStore database which can use either Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database. MetaXpress is also used for image analysis, through the use of custom scripts or analysis application modules. The analysis data can then be mined using AcuityXpress cellular informatics software. These combined applications not only store the image files but also the image analysis results. Currently, we have over 10 Terabytes of RAID6 SAS storage space and an additional 3 Terabytes of RAID5 SCSI storage space.
The data is stored on 4 Dell PowerEdge Database Servers. Two are PowerEdge 2650 running Windows Server 2003 and ORACLE 9.2 (HTS database) or ORACLE 10.2 (Image Storage database). Each server is attached to external Powervault 220S RAID5 arrays (one with >3 TB of RAID5 SCSI storage for high-content image files). These two servers are being replaced by new Dell Poweredge R810 servers running Windows Server 2008 and ORACLE 11.2. Each new server is attached to external Powervault MD1220 RAID6 arrays (one with >10 TB of RAID6 SAS storage for high-content image files). A Dell Powervault TL4000 LTO-4 automated Tape Backup with 48 slots for 800GB LTO-4 tapes is utilized to backup all data and image files with Symantec Backup Exec 12.5.
