Amazon tempts pharma R&D outfits with low-cost data storage

August 23, 2012 | By Ryan McBride Amazon has revealed a new cloud-based service called Glacier for archiving large amounts data on the cheap. The web giant ($AMZN) underlined the relatively low monthly storage rate of 1 cent per gigabyte, and the company highlighted a number of typical use cases that including housing data from drug research. Biotech and pharma companies--whose data are the lifeblood of their vital R&D activities--often store massive amounts of data referenced during drug development to check experimental results, according to Amazon. Life sciences outfits typically store such data on tape-based systems and stash copies in multiple secure locations. Amazon's pitch to biopharma groups is to let Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud computing unit, handle the management of those data and relieve drugmakers of the operational overhead. So far, one of the takers in life sciences is DNA sequencing group Complete Genomics ($GNOM). Article