Meet the new DNAnexus and its Configurable Cloud Infrastructure - Inside DNAnexus

It’s been a busy first week since we launched the beta of the new DNAnexus, our cloud-based DNA analysis platform designed for bioinformaticians. We’ve been blown away by the number of people who have signed up for the program and provided a lot of very positive and constructive feedback. We encourage all of our beta users to continue to comment on their experience. Request access today and see for yourself what it is all about.

This week we’d like to highlight one of the core capabilities of the new DNAnexus platform, the configurable cloud infrastructure, which lets you take full advantage of Amazon’s scalable and cost-effective Web Services. It not only allows you to scale your computational and data storage needs to any level, it is also fully scriptable and allows you to create an analysis solution that fits your specific needs. The benefit is eliminating capacity planning since you can now store and process any data on demand and only pay for what you use.

At DNAnexus we have always used the pay-as-you-go model for computational and storage services; this will continue with the new DNAnexus. The benefit of a pay-as-you-go approach is that you can cost-effectively address your needs today and scale up or down as those needs change. Whether you are familiar with or new to sequence data analysis, you can immediately get started with your data analysis projects without any setup costs or capacity planning risks — regardless of how many samples you might have. This is because the new platform, with its configurable infrastructure, processes samples in parallel, resolving resource contention issues among different teams.

When we set out to build the new platform, one of the most common requests we heard was for a fully configurable solution — allowing bioinformaticians and computational analysts the ability to run custom programs, tune compute performance through parallelization, and more. All of this is now possible with the new platform, through well-documented APIs and SDK, as these allow rich scripting for any data management, analysis, visualization, or reporting desires.

Another advantage of this new infrastructure is that you can now manage and manipulate your data not only via the web interface, but also through the command-line, which is compatible with Linux and Mac OS X. The open and flexible new DNAnexus platform, with its SDK language support, allows you to run any tool in any language and perform platform operations through API bindings in Python, C++, Java, and the Bash Shell. This allows you to fully automate entire workflows from sequencing data upload to analysis and report generation. You may also create best practices workflows that can be easily shared with non-bioinformaticians within or across institutions.

In the weeks to come, we’ll explore the many additional capabilities of the new DNAnexus (e.g., the “Extensible Genomics Toolbox”, “Instant Collaboration”, and “Security and Compliance”). In the meantime, please take advantage of our beta program and sign up for your own account and explore firsthand what the new DNAnexus has to offer.