The High Costs Of Hosting Science’s Big Data: The Commercial Cloud To The Rescue?
January 4, 2016
Grazed from Forbes. Author: Kalev Leetrau.
Science Magazine’s first issue of 2016 includes a discussion chronicling how the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is re-exploring how it manages funding for the many biomedical database products it supports. In particular, the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is expected to close out its funding of the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) database, one of the oldest genomic databases that has run continuously for 50 years. What does this mean for the future of scientific big data hosting?
Today the NIH spends more than $110 million a year on its largest 50 databases, excluding those hosted by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). OMIM, supported by NHGRI, costs $2.1 million a year and draws more than 300,000 unique users a month and 23 million page views a year, while the Gene Ontology Consortium draws 36,000 users a month at a cost of $3.7 million a year…
Databases like OMIM in particular have become critical standard reference databases used in both research and clinical diagnosis, leaving key questions about how to support such heavily-used resources. One recommendation has been to convert them into paid subscription services, which was the model used for The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR), after NSF ended its funding…
Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/01/03/the-high-costs-of-hosting-sciences-big-data-the-commercial-cloud-to-the-rescue/