Altius Institute Selects Igneous

Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences selected the Igneous, Inc. unstructured data management-as-a-service solution to protect and manage its massive genomic datasets, which are critical to Altius’ mission to pursue discovery at the leading edge of biomedicine.

The initial deployment of Igneous is protecting over a petabyte of data, and Altius expects to use Igneous’ DataFlow and DataDiscover solutions to accelerate collaboration with its partners.

Igneous’ resource efficient, API-enabled data protection eliminates the risk of data loss for Altius. Previously, Altius mirrored its data across a single NetApp, Inc.‘s filer. Concerns about the limitations and expense of replication, as well as the costs of legacy infrastructure, led Altius to look for another data protection solution.

“Putting all of your data in single point of failure is a fundamentally flawed strategy; in our case, if the data gets lost, it is gone forever-you cannot recreate the data,” said Michael Cockrill, CTO, Altius.

Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences, an independent, nonprofit research organization, is creating a new paradigm to catalyze biological innovation, integrate molecular and computational science and engineering, and empower fundamental technology development to accelerate medical breakthroughs. In the process, they run through massive amounts of high-performance storage and compute.

Altius chose Igneous over other options because Igneous’ as-a-Service approach eliminates operational costs that would otherwise accumulate over time. In addition, it required a solution that could programmatically move datasets at scale for collaboration by Altius’ partners. Ultimately, this accelerates time-to-market for the new treatments made possible by Altius’ research.

“While the use case of backup is important, it is not nearly as interesting as our next use case,” said Cockrill. “I look forward to having our research partners be able to expose an S3 or SMB interface for me to push data from our Igneous system to them. I will have byte-level control of the data that leaves my datacenter and goes to theirs-it will be guaranteed delivery, and it will just work.“

“As the leader in unstructured data management, Igneous is proud to be partnering with Altius Institute to move scientific discovery forward. We’ve been focusing on helping organizations with data at this scale, and have architected our solution from the ground up to make their lives easier,” said Kiran Bhageshpur, CEO, Igneous. “Altius’ work is changing lives, and we are proud to help them by managing their most important asset.“