Western Digital in Partnership With Globus

Western Digital Corporation announced a partnership with Globus to integrate Globus’ research data management software with its HGST ActiveScale object-based storage (OBS) system.

Unified access by Globus to research data,
across all systems, using any existing identity

Together, the combined solution provides simplified access to large-scale research data, giving customers the ability to capture, preserve, share and analyze data for greater scientific discoveries.

Helping solve both scientific and technological workflow challenges, the ActiveScale System, with the Globus for ActiveScale connector, delivers durable and affordable private cloud storage that utilizes a research data management service to increase productivity and streamline workflows for big data analytics.

Researchers in medicine and biology, for example, increasingly work with massive data sets to better understand diseases and find new treatments or insights to unlock new discoveries. These datasets are rich with information, but create technical challenges due to their size, complexity, privacy requirements, and the specialized analytical tools needed for analysis. Today, researchers must acquire disparate tools and infrastructures that leverage this vast amount of data effectively.

Western Digital and Globus help solve many of these research challenges as researchers can use the Globus service interface to seamlessly move and share data, while the ActiveScale System provides petabyte-scale storage that delivers predictable and consistent access, as well as the long-term preservation of that data. The combined solution helps accelerate discoveries by making research data discoverable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable for more researchers.

Additional benefits include:

• Enhanced collaboration for researchers while reducing IT management burdens
• Time savings by simplifying the access and sharing of large amounts of data
• Cost reduction by storing data on low-cost high-density ActiveScale object storage system
• Increased data durability and integrity to ensure valuable data is protected long-term
• Improved IT agility by quickly provisioning and redeploying storage resources to support new research activities

“Since 2010, we have helped many thousands of researchers in life sciences, environmental, and oil and gas industries, to name a few, transfer and share over 50 billion files and 300PB of data, simplifying research data management and accelerating discovery,” said Vas Vasiliadis, chief customer officer, Globus. “By using Western Digital’s ActiveScale System with the Globus for ActiveScale connector, not only can researchers easily keep sensitive data protected and private, they can also quickly scale on-premises storage while receiving optimal performance and high durability for important projects, giving researchers the ability to focus on science, not on IT issues.”

“Research data provides the underpinning of important new life science discoveries, and new analytical capabilities, like machine learning, are driving researchers to access and collaborate on much larger data sets than ever before,” said Joan Wrabetz, VP marketing, data center systems business unit, Western Digital. “As leaders in our respective fields, Western Digital and Globus understand the evolving research workflows, and are helping IT and data executives rethink their approach to large scale data collection and management.”

He added: “Together, the ActiveScale object storage system and Globus software enable organizations to transition to new, scalable storage capabilities that advance the study and use of life science data. The combined solution provides superior value, simplicity, durability and storage cost-efficiencies, along with the usability, reliability and performance of Globus for data management.”

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