Next Gen Sequencers Shipping with Servers?

[gavin.oliver]

Hi all.

So far as I can ascertain, the list cost for the main analysers are as follows:

454 - $500,000
Solid - $600,000
GA - $430,000
Heliscope - $1.35 million

My question is whether these ship with servers or not? I have read the 454 does but I'm unsure about the others.

Thanks

[GW_OK]

The GA doesn't.

[kmcarr]

Are you asking about servers to perform data analysis (as opposed to just operating the instrument and collecting the raw data)? I am familiar with the Roche/454 GS-FLX and Illumina GA so I'll limit my comments to those instruments. Neither of these include a computer for performing downstream analysis on.

The GS-FLX instrument control computer is a 1U server (IBM at the time we purchased ours) running RedHat Linux. Besides operating the instrument and collecting the raw data this computer performs primary image analysis, spot finding and intensity measurement. It used to perform the base calling but with the advent of Titanium that is no longer possible. Scripts automate copying/moving the data to another computer when the run completes.

The Illumina GA (GAII, GAIIx) comes with a Dell Precision Workstation (I don't know what the current model is) running Windows XP. This computer runs the instrument control software and Real Time Analysis (RTA) software. RTA analyzes images to identify the spots, calculates intensity and background values and does base calling (as the name suggests) in real time. If you wish to retain the raw images they must be copied to a network storage location during the run; there is insufficient hard disk space on this computer to store the images from anything other than a small, single end run. Included software automates moving/copying images and analysis data to a network location.

Both companies offer pre-configured, turnkey solutions for analysis servers, for an additional cost of course. Here are links to Illumina's and Roche/454's offerings. It's kind of surprising that Roche actually displays the price for a big ticket item like this on their web page. It's listed for $31,500 (USD).

These are of course optional and you are free to build your own analysis system. This is what we have done, and I suspect have most of the folks out there.

[gavin.oliver]

Thanks for the answers

I see the Roche server comes with 4.5 TB of storage. I'm calculating that this kind of storage volume would be pretty useless for the Illumina GA IIx for example? What is a realistic storage capacity for a server to analyse this data? Are image files generally dumped after processing?

Sorry for all the questions