The focus on driving solutions to enrich the positive patient outcomes requires the biomedical and pharmaceutical research communities to use global resources. With the growing number of data repositories, the industry realized that it was quickly running into the long-standing issues of silos and proprietary data formats.

Usher in the Single Namespace Working Group spearheaded by Guardant Health bringing together OEMs like IBM, NVIDIA, DDN and NetApp coupled with system innovators like Sycomp. In all, 34 companies would embark on an 18-month journey to develop a standard for data formats enabling common access to objects stored in on-premises or cloud environments.

Guardant Health currently uses IBM Storage Scale to handle the data requirements. What transpired over the past 18 months were these major players agreeing to meet and collaborate on this endeavor. Sycomp has a unique perspective as a global solution provider that typically sells and integrates all the represented OEMs. Many of the available offerings from the OEMs have proprietary capabilities, which create unique differentiators or reasons to be selected by customers. Breaking decades of that way of thinking seemed unsurmountable at first. When smart people got in a room and collaborate on behalf of our mutual customers, we quickly realized this standard opens the world of data for our customers and their users while still allowing for the OEM’s “secret sauce” to exist and the goal within reach.

The proposed standards document will now be turned over to OASIS for refinement and adoption. Once fully published, the OEMs will decide if they incorporate all the standards or a portion that makes the most sense to implement within their respective products. When the OEMs complete their adoption of the standard, not only will Sycomp’s customers benefit regardless of the storage platform they select, but the larger biomedical and pharmaceutical industry will also have a common manner to access data allowing them to focus on what they do best in patient care, research and development, and preventative medicine. This is one step in the data modernization journey to better serve all industries.

I applaud Guardant Health and the other founding members for the forward-thinking approach to making a standard that will enable critical data access for all users regardless of the storage vendors that they select and have implemented the standard in their software.

To learn more about Single Namespace Working Group and the open standard for Exabyte-scale data interoperability, please see Guardant Health’s press announcement.