Lilly continues cloud computing efforts

In pharma circles, the cloud computing buzz has ratcheted down significantly from last summer and fall. But that's not to say that use of the cloud has stopped or that service providers have ceased their development efforts.

Eli Lilly continues its pioneering work, using the Amazon cloud to provide computational pipelines for its scientists worldwide for such discovery and development tasks as sequence database searching and virtual screening.

The Big Pharma company also is furthering its cloud efforts. The drugmaker is working with platform provider RightScale, which makes an online staging area where cloud users prepare, launch and monitor workloads in public clouds. The solutions provider now offers use of its platform for customers who want to launch cloud servers on their own. Users can prepare a workload and launch it internally or externally, while still getting monitoring and management capabilities via link to the RightScale management platform, according to a trade magazine.

Eli Lilly, the article says, can use the RightScale platform to build virtual appliances to send to the cloud, and validate what's running in the cloud workloads.

- see the Amazon release
- here's an article on the Ovum research
- this is the article on RightScale

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