Abrevity Release Life Sciences File Management Software
ABREVITY, Inc. announced today the release of its BioData Manager™ software, the first solution designed to solve mission critical file management pains for firms using life sciences instruments. BioData Manager leverages a new patent-pending SLICE™ technology that empowers granular file content discovery, custom classification and search & retrieval for files resident on Windows or UNIX storage systems. Installed in minutes, easy-to-use and low-cost, the BioData Manager software allows scientists and IT professionals to find and extract targeted data values or strings found inside files created by Flow Cytometers, Confocal microscopes or other laboratory instruments.
Today, if a scientist needs to extract specific data points from multiple instrument files, it’s a time consuming manual process. For example, finding the corresponding data in a FACS 3.0 file associated with “scatter” AND “forward” OR “side” GREATER THAN “PatientID 250” from all files for analysis or FDA reporting requires manually opening each file and cutting and pasting the data into a spreadsheet, which can take many hours or days. BioData Manager can accomplish these tasks in a matter of seconds by finding the files, extracting the data and automatically creating the FDA report. Files can then be classified using custom metadata “tags” to facilitate policy-based storage management or future audit retrieval.
“Several of our mission critical analysis and FDA reporting tasks, done manually, used to take several days,” says the IT Director of a research firm in Palo Alto, CA. “Abrevity’s BioData Manager automated this task down to less than an hour by looking inside our lab instrument files and extracting the information our scientists needed for analysis and reporting. BioData Manager will also help us lower our overall costs for storing, managing and retrieving these files for audits and analysis.”
According to ABREVITY, learning how to gain visibility into millions of files and extract targeted metadata based on parsed values and locations was a year-long project that others in the field, which all rely on relational databases, have not been able to accomplish. Leveraging patent-pending SLICE technology, BioData Manager can scale to billions of records without performance degradation while most others “bog down” above five million records. BioData Manager’s distributed SLICE architecture allows independent “slices” to manage data in parallel, and a soon-to-be-released optional BioData Master Server allows an aggregated, global view and management of all slices. Others solutions using relational databases require expensive “islands” in each location that are invisible to each other.
“We tested several competitive solutions,” says an IT Manager at a leading life sciences instrument company in San Jose, CA. “BioData Manager was not only affordable, flexible and easy to use, it was the only solution that could see inside and extract targeted data from millions of FACS 3.0 files, and then classify them for policy-based management.”
ABREVITY’s BioData Manager is a Windows-based software solution that runs on standard PCs, notebooks or servers. A separate scan utility allows visibility into CIFS (Windows) or NFS (UNIX) file systems. Pricing for the standard solution starts at $5,000.
“Abrevity is poised to dominate file discovery, classification and management for the thirty-billion dollar life sciences instrument market,” says Joel Harrison, Abrevity’s CTO and co-founder. “You can’t adequately address the requirements of this market with traditional relational databases. You need critical features such as multi-billion file scalability, user-defined parsing and location-based metadata extraction, which can’t be accomplished with enterprise search or other bioinformatics solutions. Most importantly, scientists won’t wait days for results, they need them within seconds.”
About ABREVITY
ABREVITY is Silicon Valley’s leading innovator of Information Value ManagementTM software technology. ABREVITY offers discovery, classification and management technology that “looks inside” files and extracts targeted metadata for classification, analysis, business intelligence and reporting. This can include bio-tech data created by lab equipment, financial information inside spreadsheets, social security numbers inside PDFs or compliance data in emails. The benefits are much lower analysis & reporting time, reduced compliance, security and legal risks and lower backup and storage costs.
