Remote-First-Company/NEW YORK – November 11, 2022 – VAST Federal, a VAST Data subsidiary that modernizes government agencies’ data-centric operations with mission-ready storage solutions, today announced that its data platform has been selected to store valuable genomic data by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Million Veterans Program (MVP). As part of this program, VAST-powered systems will accelerate the VA’s high-performance computation (HPC) and genome data analysis and are entrusted to store and protect over 30 petabytes of valuable genetic information.
The Million Veteran Program (MVP) is a national research program designed to identify how genetics, lifestyle, and military exposures impact health and illness. Since launching in 2011, MVP has gathered critical medical information from more than a million veteran volunteers and maintains the world’s most extensive collection of genotypic data. From veterans’ voluntarily donated DNA samples, researchers can collect genetic, military exposure, lifestyle, and health information attached to patient records to help track and identify the root cause of disease.
VAST will enable the MVP to quickly scale its data storage to any capacity or computation load while ensuring secure, efficient access to genomic data for MVP researchers to accelerate and optimize VA patient disease detection. Projects using MVP data are already underway across the VA and cover subjects ranging from mental health to heart disease. MVP leaders are working with the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy to further expand the program and optimize its impact.
VAST is a modern data platform that combines the speed of an all-flash system with the affordability of an archive – making it possible for the VA to achieve real-time access across all of its data. This architecture is considered “the storage architecture of the future” by IDC. It provides a critical level of acceleration for VA researchers while also making it operationally simpler to deploy and operate data infrastructure at scale. As an essential component of the total cost of acquisition (TCA) reduction, VAST Data’s unique system-wide data reduction mechanism allows the VA to increase the volume of data without spending more on storage infrastructure, which helps reduce costs and energy footprint.
VAST is proud to support U.S. veterans on Veterans Day and every day,” said Randy Hayes, Vice President of VAST Federal. “MVP is a world-renowned research program that promises to harness the power of data to improve the health and quality of life for our nation’s veterans. By building a highly scalable and efficient all-flash data platform for genomic research, the VA has readied themselves to exploit correlations across vast amounts of data at any speed to accelerate the time to medical discovery.