Remote-First-Company/NEW YORK – September 21, 2022 – VAST Data, the data platform company for the AI-powered world, today announced that the French medical biology laboratory specializing in genomic medicine, SeqOIA (Sequencing Omics Information Analysis Cooperative Health Group), has selected VAST’s all-flash Universal Storage data platform to accelerate and optimize the analysis of genetics data for medical diagnostics.

VAST Data’s all-flash data platform replaces SeqOIA’s previous hard-drive based storage solution, which was reaching performance limitations on all large genetic datasets, resulting in lost time and analysis. Since the VAST platform went live in March 2022, SeqOIA has accelerated genome analysis time by 4X.

“In terms of managing our production, this has changed our lives. In our industry, lost time equals lost analysis, and patients who don’t get returns,” says Alban Lermine, SeqOIA’s director of information systems and bioinformatics. In addition, after partnering with VAST, the SeqOIA lab eliminated unresolved data read and write attempts, reducing errors to avoid missing or delayed results for patients.

VAST’s flexible architecture allows us the choice to seamlessly scale storage computing and capacity entirely independently, which is complicated with other solutions on the market,” said Lermine. “As we look to the future, we envision launching other methods of processing designed to discover rare diseases and cancers. As we evolve – each new pipeline will require more I/O, but not necessarily more storage volume. That’s clearly an advantage to using VAST, we’re able to design a system where there’s no ‘wasted storage’ in our infrastructure.

In addition, SeqOIA can now realize the vision of an all-flash storage infrastructure, without incurring exorbitant costs. The unique Similarity-based Data Reduction techniques in VAST’s Universal Storage data platform allows SeqOIA to double the volume of data without spending more on storage. For example, the lab uses 16 terabytes (TB) of Elastic Search indexes, at the cost of only 8TB of Universal Storage.

“With the SeqOIA Laboratory operation in France, we are proving the seamless performance and flexible scalability features of our Universal Storage architecture for the data-intensive healthcare industry,” said Vincent Gibert, Regional Manager SEUR of VAST Data.

For Lermine, VAST is not just about cutting-edge technology. The expert customer care was an additional reason in choosing VAST. VAST’s local team provides the ‘feet on the street’ support and its global Co-Pilot program proactively monitors operations and mitigates issues, should they arise. “VAST really is dedicated to our success; it truly feels that the services and support team is an extension of the SeqOIA IT team,” he concluded.

Using whole-genome sequencing, SeqOIA searches for different types of genetic events (point mutations, insertion/deletions, fusions, copy number variations, etc.) in patients to better characterize pathologies and thus offer genetic counseling to families or a new line of treatment. As part of the French Genomic Medicine Plan (France Médecine Génomique 2025), SeqOIA is one of the two national laboratories integrating whole genome sequencing into the French healthcare system, for the benefit of patients with cancer and rare diseases. The laboratory has sequenced over 20,000 genomes since 2019.