Partners take cloud into Bio-IT

The combination of cloud services, partnerships between companies with complementary products or services, and the development of new, sometimes esoteric market sectors is set to become one of the hallmarks of cloud services development. Take, for example, the coming together of Seven Bridges Genomics and Bio Team in the world of Bio-IT.

“Seven Bridges brings an expertise in building scalable solutions that meet high security and compliance requirements such as HIPAA. It is an ideal partnership.”

Seven Bridges Genomics claims to host the largest commercial repository of next generation sequencing (NGS) tools in the world today. Its Seven Bridges Appliance is designed to offer an alternative solution to using these tools in the cloud, opening up the operating system to researchers within regulatory jurisdictions that are not yet cloud-friendly or who don't have consistent access to high speed Internet connections.

For exceptional workloads, the Seven Bridges Appliance has the ability to `burst to the cloud,’ offering the first unified hybrid solution. Users will be able to pull new pipelines and tools from the cloud to their local machines as and when required, seamlessly.

BioTeam is a specialist consultancy, serving the needs of the life sciences community since 2002. Their expertise includes cluster computing, large scale data storage, cloud computing, and semantic LIMS development.

"BioTeam have over a decade of experience in IT infrastructure and hardware for research and use that expertise to deliver top notch solutions for people who need to get research done," says Seven Bridges CTO, Igor Bogicevic. "Seven Bridges brings an expertise in building scalable solutions that meet high security and compliance requirements such as HIPAA. It is an ideal partnership."

The Seven Bridges Appliance's specifications will be designed to meet the range of needs of independent labs and sequencing core facilities. Larger institutions can scale throughput by integrating the Appliance into an existing infrastructure, the cloud, or by connecting multiple Appliances to form a working cluster.

"Seven Bridges' solution makes complex bioinformatics tasks accessible to researchers. By combining it with BioTeam's SlipStream Appliance, Seven Bridges Appliance customers will truly have an easy to use, plug-and-play analysis platform that abstracts the IT burden associated with setting up scientific computing environments," says Anushka Brownley, Senior Scientific Consultant, BioTeam.

Seven Bridges Appliance owners will benefit from access to a 17-person dedicated bioinformatic support team. The team developed the Seven Bridges' open-source software development kit (SDK), based on docker.io, which can transform virtually any piece of bioinformatic tool code into an interoperable piece of working software.

Seven Bridges and BioTeam will be working with early access customers and plan to ship the first units this summer.