HEAD-TO-HEAD

The IT ecosystem is becoming increasingly complex. What solutions is the IT industry offering, and what is the future of grid-technology? NGP asked Jeannine Crockford, WW Strategic Alliance Manager, Life and Material Sciences for High Performance Computing Division at Hewlett Packard, Sara Murphy, Grid Program Manager for the High Performance Computing Division at Hewlett Packard and Ben Rouse, President and CEO of United Devices.

NGP. A need for high-performance computing makes the pharmaceutical sector a natural adopter of grid technology. However, the pharmaceutical industry used to be behind other industries when it came to broader deployments. Why do you think this is?

BR. Pharmaceutical companies have been among the earliest and most energetic adopters of grid. Drug discovery groups in particular were quick to realize the “application acceleration” value proposition inherent in grid-oriented architectures. Business benefits were proven quickly as jobs began to run in hours or days instead of weeks or months. It was no surprise that the clinical trials groups followed suit.

That said, the fundamental business case for grid in pharmaceutical R&D organizations has always been grounded in reducing the length of the drug discovery process. Yet business case standards for enterprise software acquisitions are financially oriented and require an 18-month ROI. Hence, the challenge of advancing and approving a business case based on “drug discovery time” has required a senior executive with political clout, career motive, and staying power as a champion. And the challenge has been exacerbated by executive compensation structures that reward annual or quarterly performance and short-term focus.

JC. Pharmaceutical companies have been early adopters in the use of grid technology, recognizing it as a cost effective approach to providing researchers with increased compute resources to solve compute and data-intensive problems. Broader use of grid will evolve over time; influenced by factors such as the availability of grid-enabled software from vendors, suitable application licensing terms, and organizations recognizing the benefits they will derive from sharing their resources.

NGP. Some companies are not convinced of the benefits of grid technology and their current distributed computing architectures work fine. What is the value of grid computing for the pharmaceutical industry and how do you convince skeptics?

SM. In the typical enterprise, IT resources are locked into silos, and data resides in separately owned domains. Some IT resources are underutilized, while others can’t meet peak business demands.
With grid computing, far-flung and disparate IT resources can act as a single “virtual datacenter.” Grid computing virtualizes heterogeneous IT resources so they are available when and where they are needed. Grid allows you to provision applications and allocate capacity among business groups that are geographically and organizationally dispersed. You can:

• Rapidly deploy resources for new initiatives
• Accelerate new product development, improving time to market
• Reduce IT costs and improve return on investment
• More easily handle peaks and troughs in demand by provisioning resources where needed
• Enable secure, real-time collaboration among global teams

BR. The advantage of getting results back in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks is easy to understand. Even my mother gets this. The skepticism has been around the business case definition and politics associated with sharing. However, grid technology is here to stay, as evidenced by production implementations that support dozens of applications, span multiple industries, and utilize thousands of devices that are distributed across geographies and time zones. The technology risk associated with “grid” has clearly been mitigated. The benefits of grid in the pharmaceutical industry are well documented, and are mostly clustered around productivity and innovation. The savings are undisputed in terms of years trimmed off the drug development cycle, cost avoidance related to filtering false leads, and FDA compliance process streamlining.

NGP. Many pharmaceutical companies still have large computational and data integration issues. How can virtualization help?

BR. On the research side, pharmaceutical companies face serious computational challenges including huge and growing amounts of data, increasing complexity of IT ecosystems, and competitive and regulatory pressures. With the massive libraries of data used in areas like drug screening and pre-clinical analysis, researchers sometimes have to sacrifice scope of work in order to get projects completed on time. In this type of environment, grid and virtualization solutions can be applied to accelerate the processing of research applications from virtual screening to clinical and pre-clinical analysis.

On the sales side, most large pharmaceutical companies face steep end of month processing requirements in order to calculate commissions for thousands of sales representatives. The bottleneck is in the data transformation that must occur as data is fetched from multiple sources or back-end systems. The capital and operational costs needed to ensure the processing completes on time is significant. Grid and virtualization approaches are already being embraced as a prudent alternative.

JC. Pharmaceutical R&D typically quickly outgrows pharmaceutical companies’ acquired computing capacity, so they are challenged to meet the computation requirements of their researchers. Virtualization of computing resources helps make computing resources available when and where they are needed.

Virtualization is an approach to IT that pools and shares resources so utilization is optimized and supply can flex to automatically meet demand. As resources are virtualized, and transformed into shared pools, resource utilization can be optimized, and capacity can be dynamically shifted to support resource demand. Virtualization makes the pharmaceutical IT environment more flexible, letting businesses speed up deployment of infrastructure and applications, keep them up and running more efficiently, and adjust their infrastructure more quickly when business demands change.

NGP. The IT ecosystem is becoming ever more complex. What are the dangers, and how can they be avoided?

JC. In the pharmaceutical industry, security and regulatory compliance are two key concerns. Pharmaceutical industry dynamics necessitate that entities work together. This could be part of absorbing a new acquisition or merger, fulfilling the requirements of a strategic partnership or during clinical trials when critical information is collected from, and shared with, a wide variety of people – physicians, patients, CROs, and researchers.

Ensuring that the right people gain access only to specific documents and not to others is vital to success. If information is shared with the wrong parties, the entire process can be jeopardized, putting millions of dollars of investment at stake. Securely extending access to the right internal and external users is crucial.

SM. Pharmaceutical companies, small and large, are burdened with becoming, and staying, compliant with industry and government regulations. Complying with such ongoing regulations as FDA 21 CFR Part 11, HIPAA and others is not an easy task, and is a significant burden to IT staff charged with making sure that internal controls are in place and effective. This level of compliance can be complex, costly, and at times disruptive to IT departments, yet it's also business-critical. Non-compliance can lead to damaged reputations, lost time and lost revenue; things that no business today can afford. Therefore, good corporate governance, risk management, and IT control are no longer choices, they're mandates.

BR. In a recent article published by Data Center Operations Council, most CEOs cite IT as the top area of focus for reducing complexity. The disparate operating systems, software versions, system architectures, and venders in most data centers drive high operating costs as IT managers struggle to cost-effectively maintain and manage the environment. In addition, there is a growing ecosystem of new technologies around virtualization and infrastructure management, and it is difficult for any organization to understand which combinations of which technologies make the most sense for their environment. One thing is clear: the increases in I/O, servers, and personnel that have historically been required for each new application cannot continue.

Most IT organizations have already taken the first steps of simplifying infrastructure by focusing on consolidation and standardization. These initiatives have enabled significant cost reductions both in capital and operational expenses. However, competitive pressures across industries are demanding further efficiencies and cost reductions that can only be achieved by implementing shared infrastructures, which offer significant promise in regards to reducing cost and improving flexibility.

NGP. How do you, as vendors, address these challenges?

BR. United Devices reduces complexity in the virtual environment by providing management and automation capabilities that facilitate the sharing of resources.
In general, people don’t like to share. Business unit managers and department heads are no different. Our products embrace the requirement for local autonomy by organizing resources into groups that are controlled at the data center, application, and departmental levels based on user priorities, application requirements, and business policies.

Granular capacity and utilization information is captured across every system so that application usage and performance against SLA’s can be measured and reported in real-time. More importantly, events triggered from thresholds that are compromised can be used to automatically scale up or scale down the environment according to user demand or the need to recover from system failures. In effect, our solutions are designed to “right-size” an application’s infrastructure on the fly – continuously. The result is a double ratchet: application performance and business function is ensured while capital and operational expenses are constrained.

SM. Hewlett Packard has extensive experience helping companies with security planning and governance, constructing trustworthy computing infrastructures, deploying identity and access management and delivering effective security management. HP OpenView solutions such as Identity and Access Management and Service Desk enable compliance and enhance security of business-critical information.

NGP. Where do you see the future of grid technology and its many offshoots in the pharmaceutical industry?

JC. Grid computing helps drive innovation. It has already proven to be a strategic tool in many pharmaceutical companies. The benefits include substantial improvements in the time required to get new projects off the ground, resulting in improved time to market for new products, in addition to cost savings through improved IT utilization.

SM. Over time, the sharing of resources will enable new ways of working, such as collaborating across the whole supply chain. As grid standards mature, the pace of grid uptake will accelerate, as more infrastructure components become interoperable. In the long term, it is likely that the term ‘grid’ will disappear and grid technologies will simply become part of the operating environment.

BR. Within the pharmaceutical industry, demand for dedicated HPC environments continues to grow. Companies will continue to implement and expand grid-related solutions. From a scale and complexity perspective, these companies will grow their grids globally by linking multiple sites and grid enabling a wider range of systems and devices.

Many pharmaceutical companies are evaluating the possibility of offering grid or HPC as service from a central IT organization. From a corporate perspective, this reduces overall cost by amortizing the infrastructure across business units and departments with similar requirements. This also make it possible for smaller groups to access core applications and intellectual property which to date has required a significant, up-front infrastructure investment. In this scenario, R&D groups access the grid and its applications in a utility model where they pay only for what they use. End users can opt in and opt out as requirements ebb and flow, and as budgets allow. And because of data primacy concerns that are prevalent throughout the pharmaceutical industry, I expect to see an HPC utility computing paradigm offered internally from IT groups long before external entities are engaged.

Ben Rouse: “Ben Rouse drives United Devices’ continued growth and overall strategic direction. He brings a wealth of expertise in high performance computing, enterprise systems management, and enterprise information integration.”

Jeannine Crockford: “Jeannine Crockford has over 28 years experience in the technical computing market. Before joining HP, she has held positions responsible for industry marketing, product marketing and strategic alliances for Compaq and Digital Equipment Corporation.”

Sara Murphy: “Sara Murphy has been involved with parallel processing and technical computing since the 1970s, when she was the co-author of one of the first globally optimizing Fortran compilers in the industry.”

 

Ben Rouse: “The advantage of getting results back in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks is easy to understand. Even my mother gets this”

Jeannine Crockford: “Virtualization of computing resources helps make computing resources available when and where they are needed”

Sara Murphy: “In the long term, it is likely that the term ‘grid’ will disappear and grid technologies will simply become part of the