DataDirect Networks Case Studies Accelerating Life Sciences

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	Accelerating Life Sciences DataDirect Networks

Accelerating Life Sciences

DataDirect Networks

Technology Category	Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries	Healthcare & Hospitals Life Sciences
Applicable Functions	Product Research & Development Quality Assurance
Use Cases	Machine Condition Monitoring Predictive Maintenance
Services	Data Science Services System Integration
Challenge	Public Health England (PHE) was established to consolidate health specialists from over 70 organisations into a single public health service. PHE's mission is to protect and improve the nation's health while reducing health inequalities. PHE's MS bioinformatics unit has been involved in the establishment of a NextGeneration Sequencing (NGS) Service that provides the means to sequence the whole genomes of pathogens. This sequence can be used to characterise and type pathogens, which in turn can be used, for example, to identify and monitor outbreaks locally and nationally. The same sequence may also help scientists better understand the evolution of bacteria and viruses or predict trends in the patterns of antibiotic resistance. To better support its NGS analysis service, PHE MS sought a High-Performance Computing (HPC) system that would enable simultaneous processing of hundreds of bacteria samples received from hospitals and other stakeholders. Read More
About Customer	Public Health England (PHE) is an executive agency of the Department of Health in the United Kingdom. Established in 2013, PHE's mission is to protect and improve the nation's health while reducing health inequalities. PHE employs more than 5,500 people, most of whom are scientists and public health professionals focused on making the public healthier through research, analysis and guidance to government entities as well as supporting action by local government, the National Health Service and other organisations. For example, PHE has been closely monitoring the 2014 Ebola Virus outbreak in West Africa, which is the largest known outbreak of this disease, to assess risk to the UK and ensure mechanisms are in place to detect and respond to any unusual infections nationwide. Read More
Solution	To implement the ideal solution, PHE partnered with OCF, an integrator with a strong partner ecosystem and proven HPC expertise. Storage was a critical part of the decision process in terms of performance and resilience. It was complicated to take a position on storage, as the organisation had to have the right mix of software to cost-effectively achieve the required performance. The complexity of the software factored into the final decision, as well as how the system would be maintained, expanded and administered. As a result, PHE deployed DDN's SFA10K EXAScaler storage appliance with the Lustre parallel file system and 300TBs of highperformance storage. Together with OCF, the team worked to implement DDN's SFA highperformance storage system to support the massive amounts of research data that would be generated by their NGS service. Shortly after this deployment, PHE selected DDN's WOS Object Storage platform with 360TB of capacity to serve both as an active archive for valuable public data and as an offsite backup for its primary sites. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services

Applicable Industries

Healthcare & Hospitals

Life Sciences

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development

Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Machine Condition Monitoring

Predictive Maintenance

Services

Data Science Services

System Integration

Challenge

Public Health England (PHE) was established to consolidate health specialists from over 70 organisations into a single public health service. PHE's mission is to protect and improve the nation's health while reducing health inequalities. PHE's MS bioinformatics unit has been involved in the establishment of a NextGeneration Sequencing (NGS) Service that provides the means to sequence the whole genomes of pathogens. This sequence can be used to characterise and type pathogens, which in turn can be used, for example, to identify and monitor outbreaks locally and nationally. The same sequence may also help scientists better understand the evolution of bacteria and viruses or predict trends in the patterns of antibiotic resistance. To better support its NGS analysis service, PHE MS sought a High-Performance Computing (HPC) system that would enable simultaneous processing of hundreds of bacteria samples received from hospitals and other stakeholders.

About Customer

Public Health England (PHE) is an executive agency of the Department of Health in the United Kingdom. Established in 2013, PHE's mission is to protect and improve the nation's health while reducing health inequalities. PHE employs more than 5,500 people, most of whom are scientists and public health professionals focused on making the public healthier through research, analysis and guidance to government entities as well as supporting action by local government, the National Health Service and other organisations. For example, PHE has been closely monitoring the 2014 Ebola Virus outbreak in West Africa, which is the largest known outbreak of this disease, to assess risk to the UK and ensure mechanisms are in place to detect and respond to any unusual infections nationwide.

Solution

To implement the ideal solution, PHE partnered with OCF, an integrator with a strong partner ecosystem and proven HPC expertise. Storage was a critical part of the decision process in terms of performance and resilience. It was complicated to take a position on storage, as the organisation had to have the right mix of software to cost-effectively achieve the required performance. The complexity of the software factored into the final decision, as well as how the system would be maintained, expanded and administered. As a result, PHE deployed DDN's SFA10K EXAScaler storage appliance with the Lustre parallel file system and 300TBs of highperformance storage. Together with OCF, the team worked to implement DDN's SFA highperformance storage system to support the massive amounts of research data that would be generated by their NGS service. Shortly after this deployment, PHE selected DDN's WOS Object Storage platform with 360TB of capacity to serve both as an active archive for valuable public data and as an offsite backup for its primary sites.

Impact #1	The initial phase of the sequencing service relies on two Illumina HiSeq and two MiSeq sequencing machines to generate massive amounts of DNA sequence data from diverse bacteria and virus samples.
Impact #2	Previously, PHE relied on dedicated scientific workstations, which could process about a dozen samples at a time. Now, the central bioinformatics core group takes advantage of robust parallel I/O performance to process 192 samples simultaneously-in approximately the same time it took previously to process 12 samples.
Impact #3	The real game changer is the ability to process 200 samples in parallel without any performance hits. With a computing cluster and DDN's high-performance parallel storage, results from 200 samples can be turned around in hours instead of days.

Impact #1

The initial phase of the sequencing service relies on two Illumina HiSeq and two MiSeq sequencing machines to generate massive amounts of DNA sequence data from diverse bacteria and virus samples.

Impact #2

Previously, PHE relied on dedicated scientific workstations, which could process about a dozen samples at a time. Now, the central bioinformatics core group takes advantage of robust parallel I/O performance to process 192 samples simultaneously-in approximately the same time it took previously to process 12 samples.

Impact #3

The real game changer is the ability to process 200 samples in parallel without any performance hits. With a computing cluster and DDN's high-performance parallel storage, results from 200 samples can be turned around in hours instead of days.

Benefit #1	The system can process 192 samples simultaneously in approximately the same time it took previously to process 12 samples.
Benefit #2	Results from 200 samples can be turned around in hours instead of days.

Benefit #1

The system can process 192 samples simultaneously in approximately the same time it took previously to process 12 samples.

Benefit #2

Results from 200 samples can be turned around in hours instead of days.

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Overview

Accelerating Life Sciences

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit