SUCCESS STORY: Population Health Research Institute

Population Health Research Institute (PHRI) is a global health research institute that conducts large clinical trials and population studies. The institute is linked to more than 1,500 hospitals or clinical locations in 86 countries. PHRI studies have enrolled more than 1,000,000 participants worldwide, and its Biobank currently stores more than 2.5 million biological samples. The network supports the activities of 10,000 on-campus users and more than 400,000 users around the world. Big Data, such as data associated with population genomics, was pushing the existing network to its limits, and PHRI wants to connect its Big Data analysis capabilities to centralized systems that are run by Compute Canada and funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation. The network supports all of PHRI’s global sites, so it must provide high availability. In the past, PHRI had outsourced its network and its management. The network was based on Cisco equipment that provided 1GbE connections from closet switches to desktops, redundant 1GbE connections to servers, and 4x10GbE uplinks in the core. PHRI needed to increase the performance and load-balancing capabilities of the network while simplifying management so that it could be performed solely by the inhouse ICT team.

Population Health Research Institute (PHRI) is Canada’s premiere global health research institute. Originally focused on cardiovascular disease and diabetes studies, its research has broadened to include population health, genomics, perioperative medicine, dysglycemia, stroke, thrombosis, cardiovascular surgery, renal, obesity, childhood obesity, bone and trauma, knowledge translation, and implementation science. The institute’s capacity and reach is extensive. It is linked to more than 1,500 hospitals or clinical locations in 86 countries on every inhabited continent in the world. It conducts multiple, concurrent international studies, with tens of thousands of participants in each. PHRI studies have enrolled more than 1,000,000 participants worldwide, and its Biobank currently stores more than 2.5 million biological samples.