US Department of Veterans Affairs Selects Vast Data Universal Storage

Vast Federal, Inc., a Vast Data subsidiary, announced that its Universal Storage data platform has been selected to store valuable genomic data by the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Million Veterans Program (MVP).

As part of this program, Vast-powered systems will accelerate the VA’s HPC and genome data analysis and are entrusted to store and protect over 30PB of valuable genetic information.

The MVP is a national research program designed to identify how genetics, lifestyle, and military exposures impact health and illness. Since launching in 2011, it has gathered critical medical information from more than a million veteran volunteers and maintains the world’s most extensive collection of genotypic data. From veterans’ voluntarily donated DNA samples, researchers can collect genetic, military exposure, lifestyle, and health information attached to patient records to help track and identify the root cause of disease.

Vast Universal Storage will enable the MVP to scale its storage to any capacity or computation load while ensuring secure, efficient access to genomic data for MVP researchers to accelerate and optimize VA patient disease detection. Projects using MVP data are already underway across the VA and cover subjects ranging from mental health to heart disease. MVP leaders are working with the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy to further expand the program and optimize its impact.

Universal Storage is a data platform that combines the speed of an all-flash system with the affordability of an archive – making it possible for the VA to achieve real-time access across all of its data. This architecture is considered the storage architecture of the future by IDC. It provides a critical level of acceleration for VA researchers while also making it operationally simpler to deploy and operate data infrastructure at scale. As an essential component of the total cost of acquisition (TCA) reduction, Vast Data’s system-wide data reduction mechanism allows the VA to increase the volume of data without spending more on storage infrastructure, which helps reduce costs and energy footprint.

“Vast is proud to support US veterans on Veterans Day and every day,” said Randy Hayes, VP, Vast Federal. “MVP is a world-renowned research program that promises to harness the power of data to improve the health and quality of life for our nation’s veterans. By building a highly scalable and efficient all-flash data platform for genomic research, the VA has readied themselves to exploit correlations across vast amounts of data at any speed to accelerate the time to medical discovery.“