By eCliniqua Staff

September 24, 2012 | Medidata Solutions has deployed Opscode Hosted Chef to automate its hybrid infrastructure for clinical development: from study and protocol design, trial planning and budgeting, site negotiation, clinical portal, trial management, randomization and trial supply management, to clinical data capture and management, safety events capture, medical coding, and business analytics.

Opscode Chef—a 2012 Bio-IT World Best of Show winner— is an open-source systems integration framework built specifically for automating IT infrastructure in the era of the cloud.

Using Hosted Chef, Medidata's DevOps team has been able to deliver highly available web-based services, adapting to fluctuations in demand on the fly without downtime or system interruptions to meet its wide range of customer needs. Leveraging infrastructure as code, Medidata has automated the configuration, management, change control and reporting of compute resources, reducing application delivery cycles from weeks to less than 24 hours.

"Our aim is to provide clinical research organizations with the most advanced tools to transform planning and managing their clinical trials. To do so, we need to be able to deliver new solutions securely in real-time," said Glen de Vries, president, Medidata Solutions, in a press release. "Such accelerated innovation wouldn't be possible without Hosted Chef, which has enabled a super-charged development pipeline without resource or management limitations."

Using Hosted Chef, Medidata's DevOps team can provide developers on-demand access to compute resources and automate testing processes, reducing new application delivery times from weeks to less than 24 hours, and can deploy infrastructure as code, ensuring consistent resource configuration and highly available web services.

With Hosted Chef, Medidata has access to a central data repository documenting all changes to compute resources, enabling Medidata's DevOps team to quickly and easily access reporting data to ensure maximum system security and regulatory compliance.