Unixen In Commercial Laboratories?

An Anonymous Coward (with a strange, but healthy green glow) asks: "We are a mid-size environmental testing laboratory in Canada. Our network is based on a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) which ties together Windows-based instrument software, chemists using Windows terminals (several of which have unauthorized Linux partitions) and Windows dependent PHB's. We would like to migrate the server to *nix, but the LIMS market seems to be dominated by Microsoft. Any suggestions?"

Just a quick question :

[psicic]

We would like to migrate the server to *nix, but the LIMS market seems to be dominated by Microsoft.

I know I'm in danger of committing /. heresy but I have a quick question: is there any reason you particularly want/need to change to a *nix server?
Is it aesthetic, or practical?(I guess I could understand either)
8)

Unix LIMS

[SEWilco]

• LIMS-related pages
• Sun Solutions Clinical IS [sun.com]
• LIMSource [limsource.com] (platforms not listed)

• LIMS products
• NetLab [netlab.ch] (Unix server)
• Saric [saric-international.fr] (BioCare)
• Triple G [tripleg.com] (Ultra LIS)
• Medasys [medasys.com] (Nuclear Medicine Acquisition, Processing and Communications System)
• eHealth Engines [ehealthengines.com]
• Technidata [technidata-web.com] (TDLIMS)

LIMS

[stephenbooth]

I used to work for a company (Fraser Williams [fraser-williams.com]) which produced a couple of LIMS systems. One was called Centaur and was designed to manage data related to clinical testing of drugs on animals. The other was called Mensar and was designed to handle data related to sample management (eg where and when a sample was taken, what tests had been run and what the results of those tests were), it was originally sold in the water industry but has also found uses in other industries.

If you want more info your best bet to find out more would be to email [mailto] them on [e-mail].

Stephen

Re:a plea.

[shippo]

This form of plural is quite old, stemming from Middle or Old English (not too sure which - I've wanted to study old forms of english for a long time). The word oxen still exists in the english language, and vixen also stems from this plural form, although it has since come to mean the singular as well.

roll-yer-own?

[StandardDeviant]

I'm a college student at UT-Austin, working on a degree in Computational Chemistry. This past summer I was doing undergrad research with the Sessler group, and the grad student I mainly worked with was a really cool guy (hi wyeth! ;) ).

Anyway, we talked a few times about the possibility of taking the group's information managment ``to the next level'' (<--hate that phrase) by integrating a lot of it into a centralized database (chemical inventory, lab notebooks for the researchers, data, blah blah blah) that had a web front end so any of the machines they used could access it if they could run a web browser, and they could access it from home/abroad. From what I know about LIMS, that's about 2/3rds of what you'd need. The other 1/3 would be actually interfacing to the data collection instruments, which could be either really bad or really easy depending on a few factors like whether or not the instrument manufacturer(s) have unix drivers, in-house skill inwriting drivers/data collection software (potentially pretty easy if the stuff interfaces through a standard port like serial or parallel and you know the wire protocol, my pchem lab text talkes about doing this), that sort of thing. Or you could leave the instrument-inerfacing machines as win32 boxes, and interface with them through SAMBA and shell/perl/whatever scripts to copy and manipulate the data files (<--"if its an ugly hack and it works reliably it's not ugly").

If you have a spare box lying around, try slapping a free Unix on it, apache, PostgreSQL (or MySQL if you must :-/), SAMBA, and your scripting language of choice to give it a test run. Point out to the PHBs the advantages of having software custom-written to exactly fit your lab's needs, not to mention the cost savings over the upgrade cycle and downtime associated with the commercial win32 software installation, after you have a working prototype to show them. You could even generate some extra revenue by providing consulting services to other labs in your area that might wish to do something similar once you've worked through it for your installation.

Anyway, good luck!

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