Biomedical Institutes Selecting SwiftStack Object Storage

SwiftStack, Inc. is changing the way the life sciences industry manages its research data and consumes storage.

Research organisations such as Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research, HudsonAlpha Institute for and Oklahoma Medical Research rely on SwiftStack to enable innovations that help them achieve breakthroughs in research involving genome sequencing within their existing  their IT budgets.

“Scientists and researchers create an immense amount of information and, not surprisingly, they want to keep all of it for an eternity,” said Chris Dagdigian, BioTeam, Inc. co-founder and director of technology. “The enormous amount of data that is created or easily downloaded by one scientist or an entire lab can overwhelm traditional enterprise storage platforms. Life science storage requires nearly infinite capacity, multiple access paths to the actual data while avoiding unnecessary hardware and management costs.“

Life science organisations accelerate research
using object storage in private clouds
Experiencing limits with existing storage infrastructure, SwiftStack customers are meeting their business goals of aligning the cost of their infrastructure with their research mission to translate discoveries into cures by ensuring access to this research data from anywhere. SwiftStack’s object storage software offering enables customers to manage and retain custody of billions of data objects, despite tightly controlled budgets and resource-constrained IT staff.

Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) is a non-profit biomedical research institute that found it could integrate SwiftStack software into its existing environment using commodity hardware while avoiding the expense of external arrays and tape and their associated maintenance costs.

“What sold me on the SwiftStack solution is the cost savings, pay-as-you-grow, and that it meets our growing demands in a cost-effective way without adding staff,” said Brent Keck, CIO, OMRF.

Dirk Petersen, scientific computing director, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute, said that he was able to deploy an object-based workflow for archive data without sacrificing performance: “Our multi-petabyte storage-as-a-service now hosts hundreds of affiliated researchers and gives everyday users access to the data. “Our initial deployment of 300TB using SwiftStack’s software-defined storage saved us $700,000 from the start, and its automation allowed us to roll-out storage nodes in 10 minutes.“

“As the cost of the human genome is going down and its production is going up, we want to shift and be extremely agile with new technology to keep pace with our research goals to break the $1,000 genomic sequencing barrier,” said Peyton McNully, technical director, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. “SwiftStack is an extremely cost-effective solution that can mimic public cloud like Amazon S3 but for roughly one-tenth the cost.”

“Genomic data has to be stored indefinitely because some data might require future reprocessing or must be retained due to the rarity of the associated samples,” explained Jose Alvarez, director of life sciences and research computing, Cambridge Computer Services, Inc. “To solve the storage problem, IT leaders, scientists and administrators are increasingly aligning around the business case for deploying open, scalable and easy-to-maintain storage solutions that can grow as needed without having to invest a lot of money up front.“

Joe Arnold, chief product officer and co-founder, SwiftStack, summarised the need for these bioinformatics organisations to address the twin goals of innovating in research and overcoming limits of legacy infrastructure: “The rapid innovation in genomic sequencing is generating data at a rate that has outpaced the falling costs of traditional storage. With petabyte-scale the new norm, object storage is the only approach that both addresses cost and enables researchers to use tagging with metadata to improve their data management.“