ACADEMIA

Boston Datacenters, Boston's premier Internet hosting facility, and The BioTeam, Inc., life sciences consultants dedicated to delivering vendor-agnostic information solutions to the life science industry, announced today a partnership to deliver high-performance scientific computing solutions. Jointly, Boston Datacenters and The BioTeam are developing computational hosting and colocation solutions for large-scale computing problems such as drug discovery, molecular modeling, sequence and genetic analysis in the new areas of systems biology.

Currently located in Cambridge, The BioTeam is relocating its research lab space to the Boston Datacenters' secure facility in Charlestown. The BioTeam evaluates, recommends and implements new hardware and software technology for each life science company's particular scientific research needs. However, The BioTeam does much more than simply evaluate new technology; The BioTeam collaborates with industry scientists, examines the applications they are currently using and/or need, and architects solutions to facilitate better and scalable scientific research. "I support and salute ever closer collaboration between the life science and IT sectors of our economy. The benefits to mankind are enormous. I expect that The BioTeam's relocation to Boston Datacenters' facility in Charlestown will be of great benefit to these growing industries and will help keep Massachusetts moving forward," said Thomas M. Finneran, president of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. By partnering with Boston Datacenters, The BioTeam can now provide a total solution to its life science customers. "This is an opportunity for us to add hosted services to our service menu. If a client cannot host its own servers, for whatever reason, this partnership gives us and our clients a secure facility and staff to manage these servers," commented Stan Gloss, managing director, The BioTeam. The Boston Datacenters facility is a state-of-the-art facility designed with 100% uptime and customer convenience as its key requirements. The location of the facility was carefully selected for its proximity to two power grids, insuring that even if one public utility power source suffers an outage there is still electricity provided to the facility. The Somerville and Boston power grids have not suffered simultaneous outages since the separation of the systems over 30 years ago. "We need high-reliability in order to test new hardware and software technologies on behalf of our clients. Additionally, our clients need high-reliability to conduct their critical scientific research," continued Gloss. "Boston Datacenters is the only Internet hosting provider in the Boston area who can provide us with the infrastructure required to keep both The BioTeam and its customers up-and-running 100% of the time." For the majority of Internet hosting customers, the provision of high-speed, reliable Internet access is as necessary as the space in which they colocate their equipment. The Boston Datacenters facility is connected to the Internet by physically diverse SONET rings to multiple Tier 1 carriers to avoid single cut outages. "The accelerating pace of breakthroughs in the life sciences has brought the industry into the forefront of demand for high-performance grid computing. As computational clusters outgrow individual laboratories, in both scale and uptime requirements, they can benefit from the managed, secure environment that we provide," stated Bill Southworth, Chairman and CEO of Boston Datacenters. "We are very excited to have this opportunity to partner with The BioTeam. Together, we provide a computational environment that that can meet short-term peak loads and provide longer-term managed stability, all with the level of security that the biotech industry demands. It's a win-win solution for everyone involved."