Nimble Storage Predictive Flash Platform Supporting Cancer Research Initiative

Nimble Storage, Inc. announced that the Start-up Mill at Arizona State University (ASU) is leveraging the its Predictive Flash platform to support start-up innovation.

The ASU Start-up Mill provides venture acceleration services to high-potential entrepreneurs in the university and throughout Arizona. The Predictive Flash platform will be available to early-stage companies embarking on research, including a cure for cancer.

“Through the start-up Mill, ASU supports incredible innovation that could fundamentally change the world,” said Varun Mehta, co-founder and VP of product operations, Nimble. “It is gratifying to see our Predictive Flash arrays deployed to speed innovation that can save lives. Our solution helps start-ups process extremely complex data-sets quickly and more efficiently so they can scale their vision.“

Nimble Storage first began its engagement with ASU in conjunction with the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), a non-profit organization focused on developing earlier diagnostics and smarter treatments. The processing of raw sequence data can be demanding on both compute resources and storage, requiring rapid access to data from a highly-available source. Several of the companies in the Start-up Mill work with similarly demanding data processing tasks, but lack the capital resources needed to build the requisite IT infrastructure.

Start-up Mill companies will be able to leverage a loaded Adaptive Flash array to help take their ideas from genesis to production. The array is equipped with 8TB cache along with a partially populated all-flash shelf, equating to about 600TB raw. With this array, Nimble has created an on-premise cloud so additional research scientists can access this private cloud held by ASU at a lower cost.

“The companies we work with are delivering groundbreaking research and ideas that could shake up entire industries and ideologies,” said Jay Etchings, director of operations, research computing, HPC, ASU. “However, as early-stage start-ups, getting cost-effective IT infrastructure in place to support this work can be a costly endeavor that many cannot afford to undertake. Nimble’s Adaptive Flash arrays help our companies focus on putting their expertise to use to solve some of today’s most pressing issues rather than the supporting infrastructure.“