ENTERTAINMENT

SAN JOSE, Calif., BlueArc(TM) Corporation announced today that NeoGenesis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. has adopted its SiliconServer Architecture for the storage and recovery of research data critical to the drug discovery process. In addition, BlueArc announced that it has established a Bio-IT Practice to help organizations cope with the storage and management of an ever-increasing amount of data. NeoGenesis' drug discovery technologies help identify pre-clinical drug candidates for virtually any disease-associated protein discovered by genomic or proteomics research. Its core technology includes the Automated Ligand Identification System (ALIS), a scalable, generic, affinity-based system for rapidly screening disease-associated targets; and a NeoMorph compound library, consisting of more than 10 million different molecules. The data generated from the use of these technologies to find potential drug leads, ranges from five to 20 gigabytes per day, per screening line. Current screening output can generate upwards of 2 terabytes per month, and the resulting data must remain available online for approximately three months for research purposes. NeoGenesis' need to store and maintain a large volume of data online dictated its need for a high performance, scalable, affordable storage solution that provides a single point of management. Unlike most solutions that NeoGenesis reviewed, which were capable of managing only four to eight terabytes (TB) of data, the BlueArc Storage System can store as much as 228 TB. With the ability to manage greater amounts of storage within a single system, BlueArc allows NeoGenesis to add more analytical and screening systems -- increasing the company's productivity -- without having to purchase additional servers or increase its storage administrative staff. "BlueArc's hardware-based solution eliminates the dependency on software, which we saw as a crippling factor in other NAS solutions," said Tomas Revesz, director of Information Systems for NeoGenesis. "Implementing the BlueArc Si7500 SiliconServer has given us the performance we need with the scalability and ease of management that will allow us to expand our screening capacity without increasing management costs or requiring additional storage resources. As a result, we estimate we will save more than $100,000 in costs associated with the purchase of additional servers this year alone." BlueArc's SiliconServer Family of products provides a wire-speed network attached fixed storage solution to meet the challenges of sharing, managing, and protecting data within any enterprise. With a wide range of industry-standard networking features, the SiliconServer easily integrates into any open storage network while delivering maximum performance and scalability. This architecture is particularly well suited for the highly intensive data storage requirements of research labs within the Bio-IT industry. "As life sciences researchers begin to automate what has traditionally been a manual, labor-intensive practice, data storage becomes an increasingly critical component to areas such as drug discovery," said Jeff Allen, senior vice president of Marketing for BlueArc. "The BlueArc SiliconServer Family is designed to meet the needs of high performance computing environments such as biotechnology, and we are committed to providing customers like NeoGenesis with superior storage solutions so that they can focus on drug analyses and discovery without worrying about the availability of this critical research."