DDN Joins Global Alliance for Genomics and Health

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) has joined the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, an alliance working to accelerate worldwide efforts to responsibly share and analyze large amounts of genomic and clinical information with the research and healthcare communities.

DDN joins more than 200 of the leading research institutions, healthcare providers, IT and life science companies and disease and patient advocacy organizations across more than 40 countries as a key member of the Genomic Data and Security working groups.

Improvements in sequencing technology and methods continue to produce more and larger datasets. Now with multiple reference genomes for each population and age group, storing, interpreting and analyzing this data is becoming increasingly challenging. New standards, policies and technology are required to gain better insight to data and accelerate time to discovery in order to derive the potential of this data for research and human health.

DDN’s high-throughput, scalable storage solutions power more than one-third of the world’s top genomics centers – with clients that include Life Technologies, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and Weill Cornell Medical College. To contribute to the genomics community and help meet the data-intensive needs of the life sciences industry, DDN has committed to working together with member organizations to bring the vision of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health to fruition. Accordingly, DDN will contribute its expertise in data ingest, distribution and analysis of big data, to the groups’ work to help create industry-accepted, open specifications to enhance the secure data collaboration and exchange process.

DDN offers a product portfolio for big data genomics applications, such as the Broad Institute’s BWA and GATK, SAMtools, OpenEye ROCS and more, which accelerate and consolidate data-intensive genomics environments for alignment, search and collaboration.

With DDN Storage Fusion Architecture-based (SFATM) GRIDScalerand EXAScaler, and WOS block, file and cloud solutions, DDN offers customers purpose built genomics and life sciences storage platforms that help eliminate storage bottlenecks and accelerate discovery and workflows.

Optimized for genomics and life science workloads, DDN solutions scale up and scale out across all tiers of storage, delivering industry performance, density, capacity and TCO. As a result, customers have documented increases to their big data genomics pipelines, as well as results that are up to 7X faster and much simpler and cost-effective to scale as data sets move from terabyte to petabyte in size.

George Vacek, PhD, MBA, DDN global director life sciences, said: “We are delighted to be part of the Alliance and proud to be working together with the other members to help define and develop the infrastructure and technology platforms, as well as the appropriate standards, necessary to enable clinical applications and academic research to thrive. We were encouraged by some of the top genomic centers that we work with to join the alliance in order to share DDN’s expertise around best practices with big data and cloud storage infrastructures for large-scale genome databases and life sciences workloads. Leveraging our insight, we look forward to working with members to help accelerate time to discovery, simplify collaboration and eliminate the barriers to research created by current information-silos and inefficiencies of legacy clustered storage systems.“

Peter Goodhand, acting executive director, Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, said: “With the help of DDN, the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health will continue to collaborate on ideas, identify and establish best practices, and enable interoperability. As an Alliance which formed just one year ago, we are excited to continue to add diverse and notable stakeholders like DDN to our effort, which is now over 200 partners strong.“