Illumina has launched BaseSpace Onsite, a locally installable appliance that provides a subset of the bioinformatics capabilities available on its BaseSpace cloud infrastructure.
According to Nick Naclerio, Illumina's senior vice president for corporate and venture development and general manager of the company's enterprise informatics business, BaseSpace Onsite provides an "on premises" analysis option for customers of the company's sequencers who, for policy reasons or bandwith limitations for instance, cannot use the BaseSpace cloud for their data.
With this solution, those clients can "create a BaseSpace-like environment behind [their] firewall" that offers "most of the functionality of the BaseSpace cloud," he told BioInform
Current applications in the system include a newly developed sample preparation management tool for setting up, tracking, and managing sequencing runs, and a number of so-called BaseSpace "core applications" which provide workflows for analyzing RNA, exome, whole-genome, and tumor-normal sequencing data. Like its cloud counterpart, BaseSpace Onsite also has archival storage and sharing capabilities allowing users to back up their data and share information with other users in their local network, Naclerio said.
Later versions of BaseSpace Onsite will include some third-party applications that partner companies have developed for the BaseSpace Cloud, he said. Current partner developers include Diagnomics, GenoLogics Life Sciences, Genomatix, Golden Helix, Ingenuity Systems, Knome, and Omicia. Also, last October Illumina launched a native application program through which members of the general bioinformatics community could develop and run apps on its cloud infrastructure.
Presently, BaseSpace Onsite is optimized to work with the newly launched NextSeq 500 sequencer and Illumina is offering the software with the sequencer as a bundle for customers. But it is a separate product, Naclerio said, and customers can choose to purchase the sequencer without it.
Furthermore, BaseSpace Onsite is not intended solely for use with the NextSeq 500. Illumina plans to extend the system to work with other sequencing platforms in its portfolio by the middle of the year, Naclerio said. When that happens, existing customers of sequencers such as the HiSeq and MiSeq will have the same local and cloud-based analysis options that NextSeq customers now enjoy.
Illumina has not disclosed how much it will charge customers to purchase the system on its own.