In the midst of the gene sequencing windfall to seize the first opportunity, on the cloud is the way to go

Research reports from related institutions show that the global gene sequencing market size grew from $8 million in 2007 to about $4.5 billion in 2013 and will reach about $11.7 billion by 2018. Among them, the compound growth rate from 2007 to 2013 is 33.53% and is expected to grow at a compound rate of 21.06% from 2013 to 2023, with huge market potential.

Gene sequencing has become the focus of competition among biotechnology companies in various countries and coupled with the "precision medicine" plan proposed by our government in 2015, gene sequencing has gradually become the direction of development of our country's scientific and medical field and even governments at all levels.

For gene sequencing companies, the development of biotechnology and the accumulation of gene sequencing experience naturally come first, but how to optimally obtain the support of IT power to improve sequencing and data analysis capabilities has become the underlying driving force to accelerate the development of the gene sequencing business.

The huge challenge of IT system brought by gene sequencing project

The general public may not imagine how much computing and storage resources are required for gene sequencing projects that require tens or hundreds of thousands of genes to be sequenced and models to be built. Take the daily data volume of 300T to 600T generated by a domestic institution. It can be said that no local system can scale up fast enough to keep up with the such scale of data growth. To summarize the actual situation of gene sequencing in one sentence, we can use various software to perform various calculations to handle the huge amount of genetic data.

Whether you buy physical machines directly or build your own HPC cluster, the cost is very high. The need to invest a lot of money in equipment procurement and maintenance before the sequencing business is even started undoubtedly raises the risk cost of a sequencing company.

Secondly, since the sequencing business itself is fluctuating, the number of servers cannot be controlled well. Insufficient servers will not be able to meet the sequencing tasks at peak business times. If a cluster is procured that can meet the maximum peak, there is a significant cost waste when the business volume does not remain peak at all times.

Arvest Networks helps genetic companies build core IT capabilities

Compared with the previous two generations of technology, the biggest feature of the third generation sequencing technology is single-molecule sequencing, sequencing process without PCR amplification, and ultra-long read length, for example, the sequencing read length of PacBioSMRT technology reaches 10Kb-15Kb on average, which is more than 100 times of the second generation sequencing technology. However, the achievement of these advantages inevitably requires the enterprise's IT infrastructure capacity to be upgraded to a large level, which puts forward higher requirements on network, storage, computing power, and business response timeliness, reliability, security, etc.

Based on the needs of gene sequencing enterprises for computing power and massive storage, Arvoo Networks closely combines the two needs, providing high-density computing power and high-performance, high-reliability, low-latency, low-cost massive storage systems, significantly reducing costs, and adjusting scale and increasing the speed of innovation according to demand, helping enterprises manage big data simply and conveniently, truly reducing costs and increasing efficiency for enterprise customers.

Specifically, based on its own data center resources and the virtualized storage resource pools deployed in its proprietary cloud, Arvest Networks flexibly combines multiple storage media such as Blu-ray Disc, SATA, SAS, and SSD, which can meet the multiple needs of various applications, and performs hot and cold tiering and automatic sinking based on the frequency of data access to ensure access performance and reduce TCO.

Your Network can also open up the data transmission channel from sequencers to cloud storage, and genomic data obtained from sequencers can be stored directly on Youfu Cloud, thus realizing the integration of local computing power and cloud computing power, and leveraging the elasticity of cloud computing to rapidly complete customers' computing tasks. This allows companies to devote more energy to their business capabilities, bring the value of data into play, and recommend better medical solutions for patients.

After a massive amount of data is offloaded from the sequencer, the data needs to be transferred between different geographies and different enterprise organizations. A new problem arises at this time: genetic data is relatively private, and data security is difficult to guarantee due to the lack of security measures and weak defense capability of public network transmission.

How can the massive amount of data from gene sequencing be transmitted safely and efficiently? EF Networks provides dedicated network access for enterprise customers, including but not limited to telecom, Unicom, mobile, education, BGP, and other network services, enjoying low latency and high bandwidth to ensure stable transmission of massive genetic data; at the same time, it is completely isolated from the public network and free of data leakage risks, realizing high-speed, reliable and secure data transmission.

With the development of the gene sequencing industry, national regulatory agencies will have higher and higher security requirements for relevant data, while existing data storage methods can hardly fully meet the requirements of data security level protection.

The security mechanisms such as network isolation, high security, and data encryption of the cloud platform itself can ensure the security of data. When customers have higher requirements for business deployment compliance or data security in the current period, physical isolation is used to ensure exclusive use of resources, data isolation, supervisability, and traceability.

With the continuous development and expansion of enterprises in the genetic industry, the operation and maintenance of IT hardware resources face huge challenges in terms of technology, construction cycle, and cost. Operations and maintenance personnel often have to deal with petabytes of data storage including planning, allocation, recovery, archiving, and other processes, which are very demanding for data managers and cause huge pressure on operations and maintenance.

In reality, companies in the genetic industry generally lack local maintenance staff, and many companies do not have dedicated O&M staff. Even if there are O&M personnel, the challenges and costs of O&M are gradually creeping up. Local O&M requires expenses for electricity, personnel costs, various iso-certified security certification services, and also includes software installation & upgrade, fault location, environment recovery, etc., which undoubtedly increase the operating costs. In addition, companies in the industrial park may also face various restrictions from the park, such as lack of space and inability to use high-powered equipment.

In response to the current situation that the gene sequencing industry generally lacks compliant server management services and server operation and maintenance personnel, EF Networks relies on its high-grade cloud computing data center resources in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen to provide compliant and secure server hosting and operation and maintenance services for the gene industry.

In the field of gene sequencing, IT technology led by data analysis and cloud computing has become an important factor driving innovation and change in the industry. The advent of the cloud computing era has enabled data and computing to be completed on the cloud, meeting the needs of enterprises for data under the cloud and efficiently completing enterprise computing, reducing heavy asset investment and operation and maintenance work, and allowing customers to focus more on their business development, and VooDoo Network will continue to provide technical support to promote the development of the genetic testing industry.