ILM for life sciences: the next big storage play?

Raise your hand if you know all about flow cytometers. Okay, how about confocal microscopes? No? Don't feel bad, most of us storage pros have never heard of these instruments either, despite the fact that they are commonly used by thousands of life sciences organizations for research and clinical analysis. But what we should know is that these organizations consume more storage capacity than virtually any other vertical market. Large research facilities use these devices for analysis on cellular and molecular mechanisms, and numerous hospitals and other clinical research labs use them to discriminate between types of blood cells such as leukemias and lymphomas. So what does this interesting fact have to do with Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)?

Tens of thousands of these instruments are now in use by thousands of facilities worldwide, many of which have dozens or even hundreds of them, and each one is generating tens or hundreds of thousands of files per year. More dollars were spent over the past year for these types of instruments than all storage products combined and an order of magnitude more files were generated by them than were by Microsoft Office or email users in the same facilities. The sheer number of instrument files now being stored by these organizations is staggering. Enterprise Strategy Group's Compliance Study noted that 44% of life sciences firms are doubling storage each year. Some larger firms are projected to grow from tens of terabytes to thousands of terabytes within the next few years. The compound annual growth rate for compliant-related storage systems is nearly 90%. This, of course, represents a huge opportunity for storage systems and solutions--but not unless those solutions meet the customer's needs.

One storage vendor making headway in this market segment is EMC, or more accurately, Documentum. They have penetrated most of the larger pharmaceutical firms by offering an excellent Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution that provides workflow automation as well as document tracking and versioning to ensure these organizations meet FDA (Food and Drug Administration) compliance requirements. For a larger pharmaceutical firm, a one day delay to market for a patentable drug can cost more than $2M. This can result from a single #483 FDA violation--which is a flagged discrepancy related to electronic systems and records. Larger firms that can ill afford such a hit are more than willing to invest the hundreds of thousands of dollars and many months of integration required to deploy Documentum. But for many life sciences firms, this cost is prohibitive. And even for those that do have Documentum, it does not address their largest problem--files created by life sciences instruments.

"Our customers' storage requirements are important to us, and some have experienced acute pain because their lab instruments generate a large number of files over time," says Michael Masterson, information systems architect at a Fortune 500 life sciences instrument manufacturer. "Discovery, classification and ILM for FACS files is a top priority."

The acronym FACS (pronounced just like FAX) stands for Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorter and is a trademark of Becton-Dickinson Corporation--a $5B manufacturer of flow cytometers and other bio-imaging devices.

"We're an FDA and Sarbanes-Oxley regulated life sciences company," says Masterson, "And given the large number of instrument files on our own storage systems, we have similar requirements to our customers for file discovery, classification and ILM."

Masterson has been disappointed by the lack of intelligence in solutions he's evaluated to date. "I have not been impressed with most ILM-related solutions because they either require movement to a managed repository or are best suited for storage resource management," he says. "These solutions view data from the fifty-thousand-foot level, such as only file age or file type, and have no visibility into actual business value." To date, he has found only one solution that not only has visibility into files created by life sciences instruments, but can also extract target data that scientists need for analysis and FDA reporting.

"Abrevity's approach looks inside FACS and other instrument files, extracts target data, tags the files with new metadata for classification and then allows for policy-based management," he says. "This can not only solve a problem for scientists who need to glean important information from a mountain of bioinformatics files, it also provides an answer to a significant ILM question for IT professionals--how do we classify all these files based on the value they have to our business?"

A life sciences firm in Northern California, which uses instruments manufactured by Masterson's company, frequently faced the daunting task of manually searching through thousands of FACS flow cytometer and Leica confocal microscope files to extract specific data points and then relate or link that information to other instrument or Microsoft Office files. For example, finding the corresponding data in a FACS 3.0 file associated with "scatter" and "forward" or "side" greater than "PatientID 250" across thousands of files required manually opening each file and cutting and pasting the data into a spreadsheet, which took days. Abrevity's BioData Manager software accomplished the tasks in a matter of minutes by finding the files, extracting the data, classifying the files and automatically creating the FDA report. The software then allowed the IT Director to setup ILM policies to move files to proper storage tiers or archives based on business value and their relation to experiments, audits and other requirements.

One instrument manufactured by BD Biosciences--a division of Becton-Dickinson--is the Pathway Bioimager, which has a 500 gigabyte disk drive built into the unit. Some customers have dozens of these instruments and, given the number of files created, often fill up the drives quickly. Many of these customers are actively seeking networked storage solutions so they can move these files from the instruments' local drives. From there, they need an ILM solution to manage the files through their lifecycles across tiers of storage, and then move them to archive systems or tape. But in this case, file age is inadequate for ILM. The only company offering a solution to this problem, again, is Abrevity--a startup in Silicon Valley.

"A few other startups also offer information classification and management," says Joel Harrison, co-founder and CTO of Abrevity (former VP Engineering and co-founder of Quantum), "but all of them use relational databases as their foundation. Only Abrevity has designed a new database to manage unstructured data that has a unique distributed architecture that slices into small segments. This makes us orders of magnitude more scalable, flexible and affordable. It also makes us the only solution that can solve the life sciences instrument ILM problem."

According to Harrison, Abrevity's core technology, developed over the past three years, installs in fifteen minutes, runs on any Windows PC or server, dynamically adapts to user requirements and can scan and index files in minutes versus days for others. It is also the only file classification solution that can find and extract target information from life sciences instrument files, as well as most standard file types such as Microsoft Office, PDF and Outlook PST.

"Unlike enterprise search solutions, which index every word in every file," says Harrison, "Abrevity's software first narrows the universe of files down through Boolean logic discovery and then extracts target data such as document summaries, people, places, legal data, social security numbers and even the overall tone or sentiment of a file. But our primary focus is on customers using life sciences instruments."

Given that life sciences customers will spend more than $30B for these instruments in the next year, and also consume thousands of terabytes of storage, Harrison just might have found the next big storage play: ILM for Life Sciences.

www.abrevity.com

By Chet Baffa, President, S3 Consulting