30 Clinical OMICs July/August 2017 www.clinicalomics.com
Data & Informatics
H
ybrid-cloud companies Cloudian and ScaleMatrix,
and genomic data analysis and management company
OnRamp Bioinformatics have announced a partnership
the companies say will significantly increase the speed of
genomic data analysis while providing data handling and
storage solutions that can reduce
costs by as much as 50% com-
pared to traditional cloud-
based offerings.
The combined offering of
the three companies draws on the
data management and analysis exper-
tise of OnRamp, with the object-oriented,
on-premises storage models of Cloudian
and ScaleMatrix. It allows research orga-
nizations—large and small—to maintain
efficient in-house control of their own data.
"This solution combines everything
needed—from sequencing to analysis to
storage to compute—to collect informa-
tion and form analysis on it in a single
location, so you are
eliminating the chal-
lenges of data mov-
ing around," said Jon
Toor, CMO of Cloud-
ian. "We provide an
infinitely scalable
storage solution that
sits behind the com-
pute environment,
which can sit behind the Illumina scanners and collect all
of that information to make it readily accessible to the com-
pute environment."
Four-year-old, San Diego-based OnRamp Bioinformatics
provides not only the informatics and computational power
to the equation, but also a system
for tiering which data derived from
experiments should be retained, cat-
aloged via metadata, or moved
to the Cloudian or ScaleMatrix
storage. Perhaps as important
as the data retained, OnRamp
automates the process of discarding
unneeded data that can burden genomic
IT and storage systems.
"The first part is understanding what
data are valuable," said Tim Wesselman,
CEO of OnRamp. "We know which infor-
mation you don't need, so we just sweep
it away while also efficiently managing
the larger files. Another important step
is our effective man-
agement of metadata
around the appli-
cations. So we are
also mindful of not
only what should
be moved to lower
tiers of storage, that
is to Cloudian, but
also looking at what
Triple Threat
OnRamp Bioinformatics, Cloudian, ScaleMatrix Combine
Services for Genomic Data Analysis and Storage Offering
Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief