Labfolder and NEC Introduce New Data Storage Solution for Research Organizations

Labfolder and NEC developed an electronic lab notebook and software solution that make it easier for scientists to record their findings and make new discoveries.

Berlin/Germany — As scientists increasingly generate more data, large research institutions start facing a pressing need to manage research data efficiently. Labfolder and NEC announced a jointly developed solution to address this problem.

Both companies address the needs of large research institutions by providing the IT infrastructure needed to manage their valuable data. This has increasingly become a hot topic for scientific research institutions: Scientists have now predicted for a number of years that genomics — the field of sequencing human DNA — will soon become one of the largest sources of data in the world. It is estimated that within the next decade, genomics alone will generate between 2 and 40 billion gigabytes a year. Such large quantities of data create major challenges to storing, managing and sharing the generated data.

The two companies have partnered up to provide a simple, cost-effective and scalable package solution to this problem. NEC provides the hardware, labfolder the software. NEC offers research institutions a dockerized IBM Spectrum Scale implementation of its Gx FS Storage Appliance, which can start from 30 TB and scales to 100+ PB. labfolder provides research data management software in the form of a digital lab notebook, supporting scientists in their quest to make new scientific discoveries.

According to Dr. Florian Hauer, co-founder and CPO of labfolder, their platform, together with NEC's Gx FS Storage Appliance, allowed laboratories to optimize their data management processes. Dr. Hauer. Schäffer of NEC, affirmed that the ability to handle big data in science had become a key challenge of size and complexity, calling the partnership a large value driver for research institutions.