# WekaIO and PetaGene to Showcase an End-to-End Optimized Genomics Workflow at BioIT World **Published:** April 16, 2019 **Location:** SAN JOSE, Calif ![WEKA logo with abstract white shapes on a textured purple to orange gradient background](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ult5g8gw/production/4061da3e03532447a685d4d60928329ecf6bfba7-1200x675.png) > WekaIO and PetaGene will showcase a faster, lower-cost genomics workflow at Bio-IT World, combining high-performance storage, lossless compression, analysis tools and cloud archiving. WekaIO and PetaGene accelerate research and discovery for life sciences with industry-leading I/O performance, optimized bioinformatics tools and data compression, the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data-intensive applications, will be demonstrating an optimized genomics data analysis workflow at Bio-IT World in Boston, Mass., this week. Our demonstration features WekaIO Matrix™, the world’s fastest parallel file system; PetaGene, the maker of award-winning genomics data compression solutions; and incorporates Sentieon’s award-winning genomics tools, for accelerated genomic data analysis, and Western Digital’s ActiveScale™ cloud object storage for long-term storage and archival. The cost of genome sequencing has dropped dramatically, resulting in an explosion of genomic data which if stored on legacy NAS storage systems can be prohibitively expensive. Current analytics platforms struggle to process these massive amounts of data in a timely manner, and storage costs dominate the budgets of large genomics applications. As storage costs escalate and money gets diverted to pay for infrastructure, the pace of discovery slows. Together, WekaIO, Western Digital Corp., Sentieon and PetaGene offer the genomics industry a scalable, robust and high-performance solution that delivers performance that legacy NAS systems cannot offer as well as a cost savings model that allows for the research to continue rather than investing in more storage infrastructure. WekaIO’s Matrix file system reduces time to discovery by providing low latency data access and fast delivery of data to compute servers, eliminating the I/O bottleneck and the CPU starvation problems common to genomic and cancer research workloads. With a single namespace that spans local storage and the cloud, Matrix™ delivers simplified management and data protection. Its performance is 3x that of local file systems and 10x that of traditional NAS. Together with PetaGene compression and integrated tiering and remote backup to the cloud with Western Digital ActiveScale™ object storage, WekaIO provides unprecedented storage performance and capacity scaling for genome sequencing workloads. “We are excited to share our work with PetaGene for the life sciences community at BioIT World,” said David Hiatt, Director of Business Development at WekaIO. “Genomic workloads are among the most challenging for storage systems with billions of small files and intense metadata operations. Our software delivers extremely high bandwidth and IOPS performance at a fraction of the cost of NAS appliances. Combined with PetaGene’s groundbreaking compression technology, an integrated solution reduces total storage costs and dramatically improves data accessibility, helping to accelerate the pace of research and discovery.” PetaGene genomic data compression provides up to 90% reduction of BAM and FASTQ.gz file sizes, without any loss of information, resulting in greater than 50% net savings in overall storage costs. In addition, PetaGene compression technology reduces transfer times of genomic data by 60% to 90%. Whether these compressed files are stored locally or in the cloud, PetaGene’s PetaLink technology provides transparent and secure access to this genomic data to all applications, tools, and pipelines without modifications to established workflows. “Our work with WekaIO results in a storage solution for genomics and life sciences that is easy to manage and combines industry-leading storage density and performance with breakthrough scale and economics,” said Vaughan Wittorff, CCO and Co-founder of PetaGene. “Our ability to provide lossless compression and workflow transparency of genomic data combined with the high performance of both PetaLink and Matrix is an infrastructure improvement that will benefit the entire genomics industry. Furthermore, the Sentieon tools offer speed and accuracy of the analysis of genomic data. PetaGene seeks to work strategically to provide the genomics industry with novel solutions and we are excited to support WekaIO with this capability demonstration.” See this joint solution from WekaIO, Western Digital Corp., PetaGene and Sentieon demonstrated at Bio-IT World in Boston, Mass., on April 16-18, 2019, booth #501. --- **About WEKA** WEKA is the AI data and memory infrastructure company transforming the economics of agentic AI. Its WEKA® NeuralMesh™ platform unifies high-performance data storage with extended GPU memory, giving enterprises, AI cloud providers, and AI builders a single foundation for training, inference, and agentic workloads. With Augmented Memory Grid™, NeuralMesh extends GPU memory capacity by 1000x, accelerates time to first token by up to 20x, and delivers 10x more concurrent users from the same GPU footprint, proven in production benchmarks. Trusted by 30% of the Fortune 50, WEKA enables organizations to scale AI faster, optimize GPU utilization, and reduce the cost of every token served. Learn more at [www.weka.io](https://www.weka.io/) or connect with us on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/weka-io/) and [X](https://x.com/weka). _WEKA and the WEKA logo are registered trademarks, and WEKA NeuralMesh and Augmented Memory Grid are trademarks of WekaIO, Inc. Other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners._ **Media Contact:** WEKA Communications [pr@weka.io](mailto:pr@weka.io) ## More Press Releases - [VAD Technologies Named WEKA Distributor in the Middle East](/news/vad-technologies-weka-distributor-middle-east) - [WEKA Federal Achieves Awardable Status in Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace](/news/weka-federal-achieves-awardable-status-in-tradewinds-solutions-marketplace) - [Backblaze and WEKA Simplify Data Management Across the AI Lifecycle](/news/backblaze-and-weka-simplify-data-management-across-the-ai-lifecycle) - [WEKA and Andromeda Partner to Power AI Workloads at Global Scale](/news/weka-and-andromeda-partner-to-power-ai-workloads-at-global-scale)