Nuvolos Update: Save Time and Costs on Large File Storage

As the leading cloud platform solution for research, Nuvolos has always had featureful and context-specific data storage options, ranging from our own easy-to-use file system to Dropbox integration. These files are readily accessible in read and write mode and are guaranteed to be backed up regularly, so you don't need to worry about what happens with the data files, libraries, or other materials needed to do your research work. 

There are times, however, when an 'everyday' file system is simply not sufficient. The data requirements for cutting-edge research are often so large and cumbersome that it makes more sense to acquire separate cloud storage for such purposes. This applies in particular to large files used as research inputs, like databases or data sets, that are likely to remain static over time. Unlike with small files being regularly worked on (e.g. text or images), these are less in need of tracking and versioning throughout.

For these reasons, Nuvolos provides a large file storage option. This makes it easier to set up research pipelines using such datasets (or other large files) at lower cost and with a lot less fuss.

It is of course possible to do this yourself, using Microsoft Azure or other cloud hyperscalers. But doing so is complex, cumbersome, and expensive: you are confronted with the need to find the right solution, right configuration, right security profiles, right IAM user setup and so forth, and that among hundreds of options to choose from. Since you would not benefit from economies of scale as a single user or research team, it is also more costly than it needs to be, and you have to do all the resource and expense management yourself. For enterprises, the complexity and cost control risks involved are also considerable.

This is not worth your time or effort when you could be focusing on getting results. That is why Nuvolos now offers a new and improved large file storage solution that does all this setup and configuration for you. In just a few clicks, you can scale up to many terabytes of storage space for any kind of files. 

The large file system on Nuvolos is simple to manage. Our philosophy is set and forget. You can add or scale at any time as needed. Rather than having to worry about every transaction or query, we offer storage capacities to a virtually unlimited scale, all at a flat fee per volume.

But Nuvolos still offers full control. Once the storage is set up, it can be attached to any project you may have on Nuvolos, meaning a single research-relevant database can be used and reused reliably for many different experiments or analyses. Additionally, you can of course always freely adjust names, paths, and any or all research projects a given large file storage volume is attached to. You can set the storage to read-only or read and write, supporting pipelines that store dynamic research results as static and secure data outputs, or conversely process stable inputs into different working results. At any time, you can attach or remove any number of different large file storage volumes to a given research project, matching how the needs of your research evolve.

A good example is using AlphaFold2, one of the primary tools in omics research, which is fully supported by Nuvolos. This type of research is dependent on enormous standardized protein databases, which are indispensable for any kind of medical discovery in these areas of microbiology. Nuvolos allows researchers in genomics, proteomics, and so forth to simply store the entire necessary protein databases in the large file storage, allowing them to subsequently use and reuse them for any kind of omics projects they may want to undertake. 

Of course, this is just an example from one field of medical science - Nuvolos supports any tool or program for any research project as long as it can run on Linux. Whether in life sciences, finance, AI/ML, or other fields, Nuvolos lets you turn ideas into results and results into practical applications easier and faster. With the new large file storage solution, the Nuvolos UI allows you to create the necessary storage space for your data-intensive research project in a matter of seconds, while allowing you to scale virtually infinitely - the cloud is the limit.