H3 Biomedicine Speeds Cancer Research in the Cloud With Avere Systems

PITTSBURGH, PA--(Marketwired - Aug 4, 2015) - Avere Systems, a leading provider of enterprise storage for the hybrid cloud, today announced that H3 Biomedicine, a biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of cancer treatments, is now using Avere technology to augment its on-premises infrastructure with the power of compute in the cloud, allowing for quicker and more efficient analysis of genomic data.

H3's genomics-driven drug discovery process is powered by analysis of massive amounts of scientific data that requires scalability and flexibility of data storage and compute power. While cloud-based computing presented the greatest potential to meet H3's requirements, the challenge remained to implement a solution that was both cost-effective and powerful. The company was drawn to Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), which provides massive on-demand compute potential, to solve this issue. However, as the company further explored this service, the network delay and volume of data that must be transferred from on-premises storage to the cloud made it impractical for necessary big-data bioinformatics applications.

H3 deployed an Avere Systems Virtual FXT (vFXT), a software-based NAS solution that provides the ability to deploy and scale compute in the cloud while using both on-premises and cloud-based storage resources. In just the two hours required for the installation of an Avere vFXT cluster, H3 could run all its applications in EC2 and was able to reduce the average time needed to complete data transfers between on-premises and cloud storage by more than 15X. Now, approximately 70 percent of H3's data on-premises is accessed from EC2 through the Avere vFXT cluster, allowing scientific applications to run at maximum performance and ultimately accelerating the pace of its cancer research.

"Without Avere and EC2, our only options would have been to rent machines at an outside data center -- a process that takes days or weeks -- or build out our data center, a route that did not make sense for our business based on either cost or time," said Bret Martin, principal research computing architect at H3. "With Avere, we are able to harness more benefits of the cloud. Key among these is immediate access to virtually unlimited computing resources, which gives H3 the agility needed to pursue and validate data-driven hypotheses and ultimately discover new treatments more quickly."

"Avere provided the flexibility that H3 needed to take full advantage of cloud compute resources," said Ron Bianchini, president and CEO at Avere Systems. "We're proud that H3 considers us a critical enabler of their cloud strategy and look forward to helping the company, and others like it, move their infrastructures to the cloud to enable medical breakthroughs."

To learn more about how H3 Biomedicine is using Avere Systems, read the complete case study: http://www.averesystems.com/cloud-compute-for-genomics-driven-cancer-drug-discovery

About Avere Systems
Avere is radically changing the economics of data storage. Avere's hybrid cloud solutions give companies -- for the first time -- the ability to end the rising cost and complexity of data storage and compute via the freedom to store and access files anywhere in the cloud or on premises, without sacrificing the performance, availability, or security of enterprise data. Based in Pittsburgh, Avere is led by veterans and thought leaders in the data storage industry and is backed by investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital, and Western Digital Capital. For more information, visit www.averesystems.com.