Through a new grant, the University of Arizona has paired up with IBM to look for innovative ways to store biosciences data collected in university laboratories.
Under the IBM Shared University Research Grant, UA’s Arizona Research Laboratories will work with IBM staff in Tucson to develop better computer storage software for the Arizona Life sciences Information Cataloging Environment (ALICE.)
According to an article in Inside Tucson Business, the arrangement will be mutually beneficial to UA researchers and IBM, which will aim to make its data storage software more nimble and manageable over distances.
“The whole point of this process is to learn,” Charles Lickel, vice president of systems software and storage for IBM in Tucson, told Inside Tucson Business. The university, in turn, will get help streamlining and systematizing an unwieldy amount of data from a large cohort of researchers who are used to storing their data individually.
Nirav Merchant, director of information technologies at UA, told the Tucson business journal that the IBM collaboration will yield better “life cycle management” of data by making it more uniform and integrated, and therefore easier to access and analyze.
For more information:
“IBM, UA labs team up for data research,” Inside Tucson Business, 1/31/2005
“IBM gives UA data storage equipment,” Tucson Citizen, 02/01/2005