LabVantage 8.8 Cloud-Based LIMS

With LabVantage, the most advanced, versatile, and intuitive laboratory information management system (LIMS) on the market, users can get more from laboratory data.

The LabVantage platform, trusted by companies of all sizes and in many industries, serves as the foundation for users’ digital transformation.

LabVantage’s integrated advanced analytics, embedded ELN, LES, and SDMS enable users to manage their labs more effectively by automating procedures, getting rid of paper, and connecting with equipment and systems. A highly flexible, robust system along with a skilled professional services team increases the your goal of a successful LIMS.

Once operational, the system is flexible enough to meet an organization’s changing business demands and cybersecurity requirements. Since LabVantage has less complex maintenance and training requirements so it lowers your total cost of ownership.

The Platform

The Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) with Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN), Laboratory Execution System (LES), Scientific Data Management System (SDMS), and LabVantage Analytics product are all included in LabVantage’s laboratory informatics solution on a single, unified platform.

The LIMS platform’s ELN, LES, SDMS, and Advanced Analytics unified platform ensures a uniform user experience and reduces the need to manage several vendor solutions or expensive, sophisticated interfaces.

Platform Advantages

• LabVantage Analytics: Gives users complete control to explore, analyze, and visualize lab and corporate data to recieve insightful business acumen and make better decisions. This is accomplished by providing self-service sophisticated analytics and poweful artificial intelligence capabilities.
• LabVantage ELN: Enables users to collaborate on experiments and quickly record, organize, and manage data.
• LabVantage LES: Provides electronic worksheets to capture all testing data and to ensure the stepwise execution of lab tests, eliminating redundant paper records as part of test execution processes across the user’s company.
• LabVantage SDMS: Facilitates the quick and secure collection of all findings and data files relating to the instrument. It makes data administration easier, reduces data bottlenecks, and assures data integrity with strong and versatile storage solutions.
• Configuration Management and Transfer: Oversees and regulates user modifications to their master data and LIMS setup. Functions inside administrative teams to create and record changes with complete auditing, approval, and promotion of changes for validation and updates to production environment.
• Portal: Provides secure and suitable self-service access to LIMS for external clients, removing the need for manual requests for testing and other services while safeguarding the LIMS database’s precious data.

With LabVantage, the lab’s production will increase. This multimodal informatics platform provides fundamental yet out of box, methods for turning scientific data into knowledge and better results.

LabVantage 8.8 Delivers More Power, Reliability, and Value

LabVantage 8.8 demonstrates a dedication to ongoing development by improving the LIMS platform’s precision, speed, usability, and security. Significant improvements include:

• Intelligent approvals: Apply business rules to simplify and hasten data reviews. Automatic approvals happen unless there is an exception, therefore, manual approvals are only permitted in exceptional circumstances.
• Automatic redo calculations: Users’ final, intermediate, and downstream accuracy could be affected if they forget to recalculate data manually. To increase accuracy and data quality, automated redo calculations recalculate when a referenced result is changed.
• Cyber protection: Improved protection against the OWASP Top 10 threats, including third-party testing certification.
• Accessibility: To boost platform accessibility, LabVantage Portal has received certification for conformity with Section 508 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) international standard.

LabVantage 8.7 Introduces Secure Web Portal

LabVantage users can grant appropriate access permissions to their clients outside of the laboratory using a newly built web portal that is part of the most recent version of LabVantage LIMS. By removing the need for manual requests for testing and other services, this new Portal safeguards its users' sensitive and important data.

For users outside the lab who want access to data but are unfamiliar with LIMS, the Portal features are now easier to use than ever, thanks to a new, next-generation user interface.

LabVantage 8.7 Highlights

• A secure customer self-service online portal for the lab’s external clients will ensure that requests filed by clients are processed more quickly and thoroughly and that they have direct access to more useful information and data.
• Self-support for lab administrators using their already-existing knowledge of LabVantage’s features, setup tools, and other abilities.
• Users can maneuver securely, effectively, and with little to no training due to the user interface’s clear, cockpit-style panels and simple, intuitive user interface.
• Customers can choose from a variety of “apps” that provide services, including managing their accounts on the Portal, submitting requests, following their requests’ statuses and test results, and ordering test kits.

LabVantage 8.6 and Cybersecurity

With its most recent edition, LabVantage 8.6, cybersecurity is approached much more proactively. The LabVantage LIMS platform has always been safe, but system security now has a greater emphasis on the product and corporate culture, making it an incredibly breach-resistant complement to users’ technological stacks.

LabVantage 8.6 Highlights

Hacks and breaches are headline news. LabVantage 8.6 takes this head-on with the following:

• The use of SonarQube to assess and check source code for potential security flaws
• Using Atlassian’s Jira software to track code more intently and make any security vulnerabilities visible throughout the development.
• Magic-byte detection: A list of file signatures and data that can identify or validate file contents is needed to prevent the upload of dangerous files, examine third-party libraries, and ensure that out-of-date plug-ins and libraries were upgraded.
• Collaborating with a reputable cybersecurity company to conduct continuing, impartial penetration tests on the LabVantage platform.
• Monitoring of the OWASP Top 10 keeps tabs on the 10 most pressing security threats facing web-based systems, such as LabVantage LIMS.
• Training internal staff as Certified Ethical Hackers

LabVantage 8.5 Highlights

Scientific data management system

• Collect externally created data as soon as it is produced, whether it comes from sophisticated instruments, live data sources, incoming emails, or other file sources (e.g. local drives, file shares)
• Control and protect against data alterations or loss
• To extract useful data and process it into the LIMS, create robust Talend-based parsers
• Distributed collectors can be used to reduce bottlenecks
• Make use of reliable storage alternatives, such as a database, centralized LIMS-controlled file system, or AWS Cloud storage
• Link back to files quickly, access them quickly, and recover them for use later

Configuration management and transfer

• By defining the scope of the change, overseeing change requests from submission to approval, and using a dynamic, visually appealing change log with rollback functionality, users can quickly discover configuration modifications
• With check-out/check-in and remote development capabilities, users can streamline managing changes across teams and get rid of conflicting updates
• Utilize a new, potent, and streamlined export/import mechanism to transfer configuration changes between LIMS environments

Other enhancements

• Security and vulnerability updates
• Productivity improvements for biobanking
• Customer-requested ELN features for power and ease of use
• Improved attachment management

LabVantage 8.8 Technical Overview

Utilizing a commercial web browser, customers of LabVantage can access laboratory data from any device. Since LabVantage is a completely browser-based system that complies with HTML5, there are no client applications to install and maintain, and no plugins or applets that need to be handled.

Standard Java EE application servers and contemporary databases are both used by LabVantage. A global deployment supporting thousands of concurrent users can be centrally hosted (on-premises, on any cloud, or via SaaS).

The system is pre-integrated with tools and other business platforms. Compared to other enterprise-grade LIMS on the market, LabVantage is simpler to maintain.

Key Benefits

• There are no client applications that need to be handled since it is 100% HTML5-based
• The system can accommodate thousands of concurrent users located everywhere and can be centrally hosted for worldwide deployment
• It is pre-integrated with instruments and other business systems

Key Technical Features

Highly scalable multi-tier architecture

• Presentable Tier: Using common web browsers (Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox for Portal only)
• Application Tier: Consisting of a Java EE server (such as Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform or Oracle WebLogic Server)
• Data Tier: Consisting of a database server (Oracle Database or Microsoft SQL Server)

Web browser

All user access to LabVantage is through a commercial web browser on the presentation tier. Deployment and system validation is facilitated by the application’s lack of a need for any plug-ins or applets in browsers.

Application server

Since it uses a lot of CPU power and relies on the network, LabVantage’s application server layer should be housed in the same data center as the database.

While designing the application server, companies should consider the number of concurrent users and the complexity of the system's tasks.

Vertically scaling servers (applying more computing resources) can enhance overall performance. When servers are horizontally scaled into a clustered installation, client requests are routed to various application servers inside the cluster using third-party load balancers, boosting overall performance and fault tolerance.

Client requests are automatically sent to other servers in the cluster if one or more servers fail, ensuring that service is not interrupted.

Database server

Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL Server, two prominent database management systems, are supported by LabVantage. All LabVantage data and configuration details, including metadata produced by the LabVantage Web Page Designer, the software’s user interface design tool, are stored on the database server.

The runtime architecture is guided by this information, which controls how business logic is carried out. Most of LabVantage’s processing is done on the application server by design. As a result, the database server is usually more I/O-intensive than CPU-intensive. A high throughput disc sub-system is therefore advised.

Organizations should consider the quantity of historical data along with the number of concurrent users when designing the database server. Database-level connection pooling is often not necessary or advised since database connections are pooled by the application server.

Barcoding

The LabVantage solution often uses the creation and use of barcode labels. The system has native support for JasperReports barcode labels and an interface to Seagull Scientific’s enterprise barcode label printing software, Bartender.

Instrument and system integration

An enterprise-wide framework for integrating instruments, instrument systems, and business applications is provided by LabVantage. This includes a robust Scientific Data Management System (SDMS), a validated interface to SAP S/Hana, Empower CDS, and RESTful web services.

Virtualization and cloud support

The majority of LabVantage clients operate their systems in a virtual computing environment because it is extraordinarily well suited to doing so, which lowers costs, promotes self-service, and increases scaling choices.

In addition, many cloud services providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, provide virtualized cloud server environments, relational databases, load balancers, and other services on a subscription basis.

It is completely up to the user to operate the LabVantage software—on-premises, on the cloud, or via SaaS.

Infrastructure Requirements

LabVantage implements thousands of systems throughout the world.

Calculating server requirements using a Base Computing Unit (BCU) model is advised to streamline configuration in business settings and save expenses.

Database-required BCUs

Production databases should be set up with two BCUs at first, and more BCUs can be added as needed depending on real-time measurements of CPU and RAM usage. One BCU is adequate for running development servers.

A single BCU consists of the following:

• PROCESSOR: 4 Cores
• Memory: 16 GB
• Disk Storage: 50 GB

Application server required BCUs

Around 80 HTTP sessions can run simultaneously on one BCU. An active user using the application is a simultaneous HTTP session. The following formula should be used to calculate the application tier’s maximum concurrent user load to consider named user and concurrent license use.

BCUs Required = (C × 100% + N × 40%)/80

where,

C = Concurrent User License Count
N = Named User License Count

Since it is presumed that just a sufficient number would be acquired to enable maximum utilization and return on investment, concurrent licenses are computed at 100%.

Only 40% of the users with named user licenses are expected to log in and utilize the system at any given time. The formula can be changed to reflect the user’s anticipated percentage of use of the acquired licenses.

For instance, if a lab has 100 Named User Licenses and 50 Concurrent User Licenses, it should plan for two BCUs to support a maximum of 90 HTTP sessions that can be active at once (50 × 100% + 100 × 40%)/80 = 90/80 = 1.125 BCUs).

In conclusion, the laboratory must plan for two BCUs to maintain the application server. This estimate can change depending on concurrent usage, data storage, the LabVantage setup and processes' complexity, and the reports' complexity.

Note that these requirements include each of the LabVantage tiers’ minimum hardware recommendations from the third-party software packages' vendors. The hardware specifications are for a standard LabVantage implementation and might not accurately represent the hardware needed for a particular organization’s installation.

Simplifying the hardware requirements using BCUs makes it easier to find and purchase systems for implementation as high-performance blades and other low-density systems become more prevalent. As with the database server, additional storage should be a high-performance external disc subsystem, such as a U320 array or SAN.

A fundamental setup in a non-clustered environment would need multiple different systems. Application and database servers can both be run on separate machines. The database’s storage space could be offered independently through SAN or an external storage array.

If the need for load or performance increases for any tier in a clustered environment, a company can add another BCU to that tier in the proper cluster configuration.

There is no prerequisite for clustering any additional layer after clustering one. Each tier could be individually grouped using vendor-specific clustering techniques.

At a minimum, the following base systems are recommended:

Table 1. Source: LabVantage Solutions, Inc.

Network configuration

LabVantage can be set up to offer the proper network security, whether it is running on a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN), and it needs an HTTPS connection. The illustrations below show alternative combinations as examples.

Image Credit: LabVantage Solutions, Inc.

Technical Specifications for LabVantage 8.8

Table 2. Source: LabVantage Solutions, Inc.

LabVantage Solutions Launches Version 8.8 of its Flagship LIMS Platform

On December 7^th, 2022, LabVantage Solutions, Inc., the leading provider of laboratory informatics solutions and services, including custom LIMS solutions that enable labs to go live more quickly and at a lower total cost, announced the release of version 8.8 of its market-leading LabVantage LIMS platform.

Multiple improvements have been made to every part of the platform in LabVantage 8.8. Together, they enhance LabVantage’s LIMS components’ accuracy, speed, usability, and security. This includes advanced analytics, integrated electronic laboratory notebook (ELN), laboratory execution system (LES), and scientific data management system (SDMS).

LabVantage 8.8 exemplifies our dual commitment to both major upgrades to our flagship LIMS platform and to continuous improvements, with the goal of providing our customers with an ever easier, safer, smarter, more flexible, and more reliable system that enables the digital transformation of their laboratory.

Mikael Hagstroem, Chief Executive Officer, LabVantage Solutions, Inc.

Hagstroem added, “Over the past several years, we have added major components to our LIMS platform, including options such as SDMS, artificial intelligence (AI)-based analytics, and validated enterprise SaaS. Complementing these is our continuing attention to strengthening every aspect of the user experience, as is evident in version 8.8. For example, our new intelligent laboratory approvals substantially improve the speed and efficiency of data reviews, helping our large and diverse customer base advance towards the smart lab of the future.”

The LabVantage platform is used by more than 1500 global client sites in the life sciences, pharmaceutical, medical device, biobank, food and beverage, CPG, oil and gas, genetics/diagnostics, forensic, and healthcare sectors. LabVantage 8.8 is available to serve these sites.

The following are notable among the numerous enhancements and new features in LabVantage 8.8:

• Intelligent approvals: This new feature streamlines and accelerates data evaluations using rule-based AI. The LIMS makes reviewing vast amounts of data time-consuming and difficult. Version 8.8 enables automated approvals when there are no exceptions and only allows manual approvals by exception. In light of an ever-growing data load, this new functionality enables customers to improve the speed and efficiency of their processes.
• Automatic redo calculations: Users could overlook the need to manually recalculate data, which could harm accuracy at several levels downstream. The improved functionality automates recalculation whenever a reference is changed, freeing users to concentrate on their current activity while increasing precision and data quality.
• Enhanced cyber security: The OWASP Top 10 risks are fully protected by LabVantage 8.8, which also incorporates testing certification from a third party. The OWASP Top 10 guideline for web application developers reflects a comprehensive understanding of the most critical cybersecurity threats. These added security measures, which are now part of LabVantage 8.8, represent further security enhancements and provide users with more peace of mind.
• Accessibility: LabVantage 8.8 has features for better compliance with Section 508 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) international standard, as part of ongoing efforts to better serve all its customers. These features are designed to make it easier for users who have visual or other accessibility issues to access the platform. A WCAG compliance certification for the upgraded LabVantage Portal is now in place, attesting to several new features that promote accessibility.

The LabVantage Professional Services team is prepared to assist users in getting the most out of the version 8.8 advancements owing to the company’s reputation for providing exceptional customer satisfaction.