University of Florida Tames Big Science Data Growth

Providing more than 400 world-class services to a wide range of life science researchers, the University of Florida’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research (ICBR) has selected DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) storage as the foundation for a converged infrastructure designed to accommodate ever-increasing life sciences and bioinformatics workloads.

As one of the nation’s top cross-disciplinary life sciences academic research facilities, ICBR’s data load explodes with every new high-speed device investment including next generation sequencers and Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) instruments, which are capable of generating terabyte of data per day.

To tame its big data growth within the constraints of limited data center space and funding and a lean administrative team, ICBR turned to DDN’s appliance-based approach to converged infrastructure which allowed them to reduce their storage and application server footprint by 350%. This converged approach gives ICBR a secure, shared model to use as building blocks to scale up or out to meet future research requirements.

Using DDN Storage Fusion Architecture storage engine with In-Storage Processing converged compute capabilities and DDN’s GRIDScaler parallel file system, ICBR was able to deploy an adaptive and customizable architecture for storing, managing and analyzing large collections of distributed data totaling billions of files and petabytes of storage across tens of federated data grids. Now, since researchers can access as little or as much data as they choose, internal and external ICBR researchers, as well as partner institutions, can focus on scientific advances such as innovation in antibody development and production, rather than on IT infrastructure.

With DDN solutions, life sciences organizations continue to document meaningful performance increases, and up to 75% faster genomics pipeline throughput than traditional storage platforms.

DDN accelerates Life Sciences Time-to-Discovery
and collaboration with converged infrastructure solution
With DDN’s In-Storage Processing, ICBR can eliminate latency, servers and switches since parallel file systems and user applications are embedded right inside the storage appliance using a standard virtualization layer.

For ICBR, DDN’s ability to embed applications like iRODS – an open source data grid solution for managing large sets of computer files – within the storage system enables the center’s cyberinfrastructure team to make it easier for anyone involved in a research project to view, manage, access, add and share data as part of a converged infrastructure solution.

ICBR also can take advantage of an integrated appliance to offer geographically dispersed departments, research groups and lab staff an increased ability to collaborate more freely on research data.

Aaron Gardner, Cyberinfrastructure section director for the Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research, said: “Our goal was to develop storage building blocks that would enable us to assemble any kind of storage researchers may need in a simple and secure shared-storage model.

“We now have the opportunity to build an authoritative, immutable data warehouse that provides a safe harbor in the middle of the ‘Wild Wild West’ of scientific research. Based on that, as well as the ability to increase performance with smaller footprint, fewer hardware costs, lower management overhead and latency makes me confident we are headed in the right direction.

“We were able to take advantage of DDN’s embedded platform to take in iRODS with distributed storage, which hasn’t been done before. We have the benefit of pairing the two in a way that’s easy to manage.

“The combination of fast performance with low latency means that accessing and aligning storage resources don’t distract from the science. We can scale to a few thousand files a second with a couple hundred simultaneous R/W transactions easily.“