This was a challenge faced by Barcelona, Spain-based pharmaceutical and chemical research firm Mind the Byte. Mind the Byte provides its chemo and bioinformatics web platform iMols to researchers who need to compile various molecules, proteins and activities databases. Results, according to Mind the Byte founder Alfons Nonell-Canals, are delivered within a few seconds, or days.

Like many companies, this one chose to deploy its services on clouds rather than build their own data center. Today, Mind the Byte manages its systems from Barcelona, stores its biochemical data in Amazon S3 and accesses and processes them via iMols running on EC2 instances in Amazon's Virginia data center. For a time the company also ran part of its systems within a Netherlands-based data center, close to its European customers.

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