Varian Galaxie

[lake]

Hi,

I came across this forum yesterday and wanted to reply to some previous queries about the Galaxie Chrom Data System. I know this reply is late, but thought I would post anyway as it may be useful information for others considering using Galaxie. The original post was locked, so I created this new topic.

I worked in an IT group at a large pharmaceutical company, and we validated, implemented and supported Galaxie client/server. We initially started with Diamir v1.5 CDS (Diamir was renamed to Galaxie as of v1.6 of the software) and later upgraded to Galaxie v1.8 (the current version).

At our peak we had approximately 400 active users, typically resulting in 100 concurrent users during primetime hours, actively acquiring and reprocessing data.

My impressions with Galaxie is that I was very impressed with how scalable the system is. It works very well as a single instrument installation (the workstation version), but scales very nicely in the client/server version. We implemented it on several multi-processor Windows servers. We did a great deal of stress testing to determine the best configuration based on our user requirements. The Galaxie software is architected in a way that allows for distributing the workload among many servers in large environments such as ours, or it can all be installed on a single PC for small environments. Because we had so many end users, in order to avoid having to install the client software on every end-user's PC, we used Citrix Metaframe servers to host the Galaxie client. We then used other application servers to host the main Galaxie server, and the acquisition/sequence processing components.

Galaxie v1.8 has proven to be very stable and is working nicely for us. Galaxie (Diamir) was initially chosen to replace two legacy CDS's (Access*Chrom and HPLAS). Galaxie was chosen over several other CDS's due to it meeting the user requirements more completely than the competitors. Some of the comments from the CDS evaluators were that Galaxie's user interface is very intuitive and easy to learn unlike some of the other systems. Since we have so many end users, ease of use was a large concern for us.

As far as support from Varian, we received excellent support from them. Their developers are very responsive and were quick to supply patches when needed. I'm not sure if that would be everyone's experience, but that was our experience with them.

I hope this information is useful to anyone considering Galaxie. I will check back every now and then to see if there are any questions. Like I said - I am an IT person (not a chromatographer), so may not be able to answer more scientific questions.

Thank you.

[dpr]

currently using Galaxie 1.8b

would agree with most of above.
now working on integrating galaxie and lims systems.

currently exporting data and working towards bi directional transfers

the cds is stable and robust and has been well recieved by the analysts as user friendly.
admin is straight forward too.

[Tim]

What HPLC systems are you using Galaxie with?

If you are using something other than Varian systems, what level of instrument control does Galaxie offer and how do you handle instances where there is a problem in communication between the instruments and Galaxie?

If you buy a new HPLC, which may have a newer firmware version, what assurances do you have that Galaxie will still work with the new firmware?

[lake]

Hi Tim,

Galaxie offers Level 3 instrument control for most HPLC's, and has Level 4 for some.

To answer your other questions, of course you would want to confirm with Varian whether Galaxie will work with your new HPLC.

Varian has done a good job of updating drivers when needed - especially for the more common instruments. Of course it is not surprising that there might be a short lag time between when a new instrument is introduced to when a Galaxie driver is available. I imagine this is true for every CDS unless you use the same vendor for all of your instrumentation and CDS. The company that I worked for used a variety of vendors for their instrumentation and Galaxie did a good job of supplying drivers for most of the instruments. Of course analog acquisition could be used for all of the instruments regardless of whether a control driver was available or not.

Hope this helps.

[lake]

Oh sorry - after re-reading your post, I see that I forgot to answer your question about which instruments we use.

The company I worked for used instrumentation from several different vendors - sometimes even throwing different vendor autosamplers into the mix. Probably the most common instruments used there are Agilent 1100s and 6890s. Also have some Waters, Varian and some others.

[Tim]

You seem to have gone the way the company I work for decided against - cross control. The closest we got was Agilent and Waters, since they had an "official" agreement to exchange control codes (as opposed to a number of the others - Galaxie possibly included - where control was just from published codes or reverse engineering).

Even with Agilent and Waters there was a "lag", which actually appeared to be due to Agilent not telling Waters they had gone up a full point on their firmware! That put the cosh on cross control completely (and unfortunately meant more headaches for me as I've since had to change CDS applications twice in the last 3 years!).

Good to hear of someone having success with cross-control.

[dr_Pyrex]

I work with Galaxie 1.7 (Windows 2000) with single instrument - Varian Prostar. In my opinion this software has many bugs and I do not have many pleasure in using it.
Now I have proposition to upgrade software to 1.8b version. Could you describe some new features of this software? Any big changes or rather small "tuning"???

Thanks

[dpr]

I have no practical experience of 1.7, only a demo.

I have found 1.8 easy to use and configure.
1.8a had a few bugs, notably on twin channel instruments the dilution set on one side (a or b) was applied to both channels. This has been resovled in 1.8b

1.8b has a good manager application that allow easy set up and configuration of instruments. The association page gives an editable overview of the system at the admin level. Instrument control is good on Agilent 6890 (our main GC).

In use 1.8b has proven user friendly. I understand 1.7 did not allow two different samples to be run on a single twin channel instrument. This is possible on 1.8b, now with the facility for indepentant dilutions to be used also.

An export facility for transfering data out to a LIMS is available which we use successfully.

Full second server redundancey backup is available. The process of switching to the auxillary server if required is stright forward with only the lost of current runs should this be unscheduled.

I understand 1.8c has developments in manual integration allowing greater functionality in this area.

The possibility of searchable archiving is available by linking to another database, although we simply write data to CD on a monthly basis.

[Bob Lott]

Could you describe some new features of this software? Any big changes or rather small "tuning"???

Thanks

Galaxie 1.9 has just been released. It has major enhancements over 1.7 in many areas (integration, reporting, column log......). You should ask your Varian representative for a demonstration.