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Bio-IT World 2017 Recap

169 exhibitors with 25 storage players

The 15th Bio-IT World Conference & Expo 2017 happened recently in Boston, MA, with approximately 3,000 attendees.

Genomics sequencing, drug discovery, blood analysis, 3D imaging, microscopy, biomedical research are just a few subjects covered during the recent conference and how IT can help, boost and support such crucial activities.

Supported by a conference program of 13 tracks and 14 workshops, topics were about the impact of cloud and how to leverage it for better practices such the improvement of collaboration methods, unifying and aggregating multiple sources of data. Security aspects were in the past a serious issue that finally disappeared to gain stability and serious features.

The conference also confirmed other needs such:

  • Capacity and scalability,
  • Reliability and immutability with compliance and regulations capabilities,
  • Accessibility and manageability,
  • Collaboration, interoperability and distribution,
  • Storage optimization, and,
  • As mentioned security and privacy.

Also we understood that there is no preferred model between a private, public or hybrid cloud models, all seem to be well adapted now to various usages and applications. Here, hybrid means to keep applications on-premise connected to a cloud-based storage. But speaking with several vendors and listening to users during conference, we learned that more and more applications are running in the cloud such EHR for instance. By public, IT practitioners in that industry preferred to use the term restricted public cloud as it’s not a ‘classic’ public one used by anybody, as data are too sensitive. With the massive volume of data, growing at a rapid pace, considering a cloud-based approach for computing and storage has gained fast adoption as it doesn’t limit scalability.

The cloud brings also an immediate value as it offers a better patient engagement as you can contact patient where they are with many flexible tools and solutions.

To measure some challenges, let illustrate the capacity one with a genomic sequencer that can produce 1PB per year and it means other data services to protect such information, process it and share and distribute it potentially. Applications connected to the sensitive data expose variable workloads and access patterns: small or large file, transaction, random or sequential I/O operations with various sizes. It’s pretty common to see very large cluster with hundreds of nodes and huge capacity several dozens of petabytes even a few hundreds in a single file system.

So vendors who participate in the cloud journey with a fast, safe and secure transition to the cloud are better placed in the competition but also vendors who provide a multi-tier or end-to-end approach. This capability means that metadata are key in bio, life sciences and healthcare to support and better implement a long-term retention of unstructured data. It’s why iRods has some interesting successes in that sector just to name an open source project.

Globally the expo had 169 exhibitors with 25 storage players, but we didn’t find NetApp on the expo floor or other players playing in object storage or cloud integrated storage players such Nasuni or Panzura. By alphabetic order, the storage companies were Avere, Cloudian, DDN Storage, Dell EMC, Dternity, Elastifile, HDS, HGST, HPE, IBM, Igneous, iRods Consortium, Komprise, Nexsan, NooBaa, Panasas, Pure Storage, Quantum, Qumulo, Seagate, Starfish, SwiftStack, Veeam, Wasabi and Weka.IO.

Among them, some have made some announcements and presentations:

  • Avere Systems announced a success story at BioTeam and has co-presented a joint session named Freeing Data: How to Win the War with Hybrid Clouds.
  • Cloudian and Komprise jointly unveiled their collaboration around a storage optimization solution centered on inactive data.
  • DDN Storage has demonstrated its new end-to-end approach with the BIOScaler solution already adopted by several genomics research organizations.
  • Elastifile has presented for the first time its cross-cloud data fabric based on its innovative elastic cloud file system.
  • HGST presented a session titled Extreme Durability for Your Bioinformatics Data and covered several products such ActiveScale, InfiniFlash or UltraStar.
  • IBM also announced a success story at Sidra Medical and Research Center and presented several sessions.
  • And Quantum did a presentation named The New Era of Integrated Data Storage.
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