The Stanford Microarray Database 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 who study a diverse set of biological and medical questions. Many of these investigators funded by the NIH, although few of them have funding for the bioinformatics and computational support that SMD provides. This application seeks funding to purchase a new computer system for the Stanford Microarray Database, which will replace the current system, which is nearly three years old and is inadequate to meet the increasing demands of SMD users. Specifically, this grant proposal seeks funding for a server to accommodate the database, a server to provide additional computational power, a RAID array for data storage, three RAIDs for image storage and backup, a backup library, a partitioning license from Oracle, and the appropriate uninterruptable power supplies and storage racks for the machines. SMD has strong institutional support, and support for staff is provided by funding for microarray studies of human cancer in the joint laboratory of Dr. David Botstein and Dr. Patrick Brown. However there exists no SMD funding for purchase of this new system. Specifically, the new system that we are seeking to purchase will provide long-term expandability, increased processing power for more computationally intensive analyses, increased performance of data retrieval, a better development and testing environment and a decrease in downtime due to scheduled data backups. Without this new system SMD will be unable to meet the growing demands of its community of researchers.
