Is the cloud good value for money?

There are three flavours of companies that provide cloud storage for sequencing data: Generalist providers such as Amazon, Cycle Computing, or Microsoft,  sequencing technology providers such Illumina (their BaseSpace uses Amazon's cloud infrastructure) or Life Technologies, and cloud genomics-only providers, of which DNAnexus is the only one I have come across.

Insert your cloud pun here

How much value for money is the cloud? Consider this simple calculation: DNAnexus charges academic users $10to store one gigabase of raw sequence data for two years. A 3-gigabase human genome at decent quality (25-fold coverage) comes to 75 gigabases, or $750 at DNAnexus prices. For comparison: An external hard drive which would easily hold the same data costs $89.99.

Whether that is good value for money depends on what you want to do with your sequencing data. If all you want is a place to store it, DNAnexus may be a hard sell. It takes a long time to upload your files, and the example above shows that it is more expensive than to store it locally. 

This looks differently if instead of whole genome data as in the example above, you are dealing with other types of sequencing data. For example, DNAnexus provides ways to store exome or ChIP-Seq data, which take less space and are therefore less expensive.

You probably also want to analyse your data. DNAnexus offers software tools for genomic analysis that are designed to be intuitive to use for standard tasks like variant calling. For whoever is looking for an integrated solution, cloud services like DNAnexus may therefore be worth a try.

Please remember that as always, the views in this blog are my own and are not endorsed by the Wellcome Trust or the Sanger Institute.