Deploying PetaGene’s lossless compression for genomic data at a premier Children’s Hospital in the United States.
Understanding the genomic information of a patient is key in diagnosing a plethora of genetic and rare diseases. As a result, genome sequencing approaches such as Whole Exome Sequencing (WES) and Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) are growing in use in clinical and research laboratories such as at CH.
A critical challenge emerges as genome sequencing scales up - how to manage the increasing cost of storing these data. At CH, the volume of sequencing data is growing rapidly along with the associated storage costs. CH were looking for solutions to reduce ballooning costs of storing these data that needed to be accessed for critical research and analysis. To solve this challenge CH adopted PetaGene’s lossless compression software to tremendous effect:
“Within two months of deploying PetaGene’s compression solution, CH had made a return on investment, recovering the full cost of the PetaGene licence in storage savings. With PetaGene, we now have better control over the growth of our NGS data, allowing us to reduce storage costs while freeing up financial resources for more compute and analysis to further the research and clinical goals of CH. Hospital senior management consider the PetaGene purchase a big success.”
- Infrastructure Manager, CH
| File type | # Files | Input Size (TB) | Output Size (TB) | Savings (TB) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FASTQ.gz | 663,669 | 854 | 360 | 494 (58%) |
| BAM | 849,465 | 2,165 | 879 | 1,286 (59%) |
| Total | 1,513,134 | 3,019 | 1,239 | 1,780 (59%) |
“Deploying PetaGene at CH was a straightforward process. Our users do not have to modify any of their tools or workflows since PetaGene’s decompression library transparently serves original uncompressed data to the tools/pipelines. Since users are essentially able to work with the original data except that the data is more than 50% smaller, there are additional benefits such as faster data transfer speeds and analysis times.”
- Principal Systems Engineer, CH