Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics Selecting Red Hat Ceph Storage

Red Hat, Inc. announced that the Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics (CLIMB) has selected and implemented Red Hat Ceph Storage for their large-scale extensive research needs.

Red Hat Ceph Storage offers a block and object storage platform capable of scaling to meet the demands of researchers who are sequencing large amounts of data.

A collaborative medical research project involving University of Warwick, Swansea University, Cardiff University, and the University of Birmingham, CLIMB aims to provide free cloud-based compute, storage, and analysis tools for academic microbiologists in the UK.

CLIMB features a large and geographically dispersed community of researchers contributing to the initiative. That community needed a shared IT infrastructure to facilitate collaboration, support new medical breakthroughs, and better manage data. The solution had to be easy to use, able to absorb hundreds of TBs of data, and scalable on demand to petabytes.

Ceph Storage provides CLIMB with object storage that is capable of meeting the large-scale storage requirements needed to help support medical breakthroughs. Designed for the cloud, it can lower the cost of storing enterprise data and helps CLIMB manage data growth automatically. Capitalizing on Ceph Storage’s demonstrated ability to handle web scale object storage, CLIMB can scale to 1.5PB of raw object storage per site.

Thomas Connor, Ph.D., senior lecturer, Cardiff University and co-investigator, CLIMB, said: “Red Hat Ceph Storage provides us with a high-performing system that can scale to meet the significant storage needs required for genomic sequencing. With researchers in both the office and the field we needed a system that was compatible with our cloud platform, and we’ve received that with Red Hat Ceph Storage. The system has been well received by our researchers, allowing them to scale up resources as required.“

Ranga Rangachari, VP and GM, Storage, Red Hat, said: “The researchers at CLIMB are working on some of our toughest medical issues, and we applaud their efforts. Their work requires a storage solution that can handle the scale of their endeavor and enable them to focus on what is important to them. We are proud to be supporting the CLIMB research project with storage technology that can help to advance the project’s objectives. This exemplifies how Red Hat’s solutions can be used to help solve specific scientific challenges, and how open source software can help researchers work together to achieve their goals.“

Case study