This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Shared Instrumentation Grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the grant, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Stanford Microarray Database (SMD; http://smd.stanford.edu/) stores microarray data and associated biological annotation, and provides interfaces for retrieval, quality assessment and analysis of those data. SMD currently hosts the data of a broad community of investigators, many of whom are funded by the NIH, who study a diverse set of biological and medical questions. SMD currently supports the research efforts of more than 200 laboratories, providing more than 1,000 researchers (both on and off campus) with the tools they need to carry out effective microarray research. SMD has enabled researchers at Stanford to publish on average an article per week for the last 2 years. SMD is currently the largest academic research microarray database in the world, and is growing by approximately 10,000 microarrays per year, currently storing data for more than 50,000 microarrays, which comprise more than 1.5 billion spots/features. This application seeks funding to upgrade SMD's current storage system, and to purchase a new clustered web server. Given the rate of data accumulation, SMD's current storage system only has room to support expansion of the current production data for the next 18 months - the upgrade that we propose to purchase will provide storage for up to the next 5 or 6 years. In addition, the proposed new storage system incorporates additional redundancy, protecting against potential hardware failures, and reducing the potential for contention between simultaneous user requests to the system. The webserver that we propose to purchase will be used to replace a 5 year old web server that is no longer supported by the vendor (Sun Microsystems), and for which spare parts can no longer be purchased. The new server will provide additional redundancy within the system, protecting against potential hardware failures, will be able to support more requests within a given amount of time, and will result in significant time savings for researchers using the database. SMD has strong institutional support, as well as continued funding for a strong, talented and experienced team. However, in the absence of funding to expand its current system, the storage of additional data beyond 2006 is not guaranteed, and given that SMD's web server is not longer supported by its manufacturer, users may be exposed to unanticipated and extended downtime should the current server fail.
