NetApp De-Dup Helps Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy

NetApp announced that the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy (IGSP) dramatically reduced its storage capacity for its ever-growing genomic information with NetApp deduplication, helping to decrease the institute’s overall hardware, power, and administration requirements. With NetApp, Duke IGSP can now scale to meet rapidly rising storage needs while improving its storage efficiency for its virtual environment.

The IGSP is comprised of Duke University students, faculty, and staff and is dedicated to the study of life through scientific inquiry involving interdisciplinary research in genome sciences and policy. These scientists passionately support and facilitate campus-wide research and scholarship that explore the impact of genome sciences on all aspects of life, human health, and social policy.

Creating and analyzing genomic information requires a substantial amount of data storage. In IGSP’s case, that meant a data storage infrastructure that grew from 4TB to 300TB within a two-year span. Much of this data was contained in large Oracle databases on dedicated servers and locally attached storage. “We just bought more disks and kept giving them to Oracle,” said database administrator Rob Wagner. “Over time this proved to be very difficult to manage. Server sprawl and inefficient data storage utilization became a constant headache.”

To resolve this rapid growth dilemma, IGSP embarked on a server virtualization project, collapsing 40 physical servers down to just 3 for the institute’s Oracle applications. In conjunction with this project, IGSP also made the transition from locally attached storage to consolidated, network-attached NetApp FAS systems.

Today, the IGSP environment consists of a 40-node high-compute server farm, 3 VMware ESX servers, and 50 mixed-use application servers with all data provisioned from a NetApp FAS3070 clustered storage system. A direct benefit of this project was a more manageable storage infrastructure. Alan Cowles, IGSP system administrator, explained: “Previously, I spent more time managing 60TB to 70TB of direct-attached storage than I do managing the 225TB of NetApp storage we have now.”

NetApp deduplication also played a key role in harnessing data growth at IGSP. “NetApp has saved us a lot on storage for VMware. When we originally set up VMware, I allocated about 2.4TB for it. With NetApp deduplication, I’ve been able to shorten that down to less than 700GB. We now see an average of 83% reduction in redundant data on our VMware systems.”

“Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy is a prime example of what we hear from many of our customers today,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions Marketing at NetApp. “Based on deduplication savings alone, IGSP has told us that their storage expansion costs have decreased by 18% to 20% per year. Add to that our other features such as thin provisioning and RAID-DP® and our customers realize tremendous benefit from NetApp storage efficiencies.”

NetApp deduplication is a fundamental component of NetApp’s core operating architecture, Data ONTAP®. NetApp deduplication is the first that can be used broadly across many applications, including primary data, backup data, and archival data. NetApp deduplication combines the benefits of granularity, performance, and resiliency to provide businesses and institutions with a significant advantage in their race to meet ever-increasing storage capacity demands.