BlueArc Virtualization for Washington University Imaging Research

BlueArc Corporation announced that the Center for Clinical Imaging Research (CCIR) within Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University in St. Louis is using BlueArc’s Titan to provide backend storage for a VMware virtual server environment serving the Center’s bioimaging research. BlueArc virtualization technology helps CCIR extend the performance and reliability of its Titan storage infrastructure to more than 60 virtual machines requiring fast access to large sets of image files, without the complexity of additional hardware and software infrastructure.

The CCIR supports basic and cutting-edge healthcare research that uses advanced bioimaging and information technology systems to seek visual markers of disease and pursue new techniques for radiology, pharmaceutical research and more. It taps the Radiology department’s Titan implementation, which also supports the Neuro Imaging Lab, cancer research and other departmental research computing requirements. Rather than add storage attached network technology at additional expense, House chose a virtualization strategy using VMware ESX, tied into BlueArc Titan via Network File System (NFS) protocol, making the most of existing technology investments.

BlueArc Titan creates a unified directory structure across file system types enabling global data access to any node or mount-point. This allows CCIR to manage virtual storage pools and file systems without affecting how users access their files. CCIR has also leveraged the Titan’s flexible file virtualization capabilities to allow for direct transfer of large data sets from the center’s multiple biomedical imaging scanners directly to shared file systems. Additionally, CCIR is using Titan’s replication capabilities to duplicate the virtual machines over to a secondary site for simplified disaster recovery purposes.

The Titan family of storage solutions delivers world-record performance and scales to 4 petabytes of tiered Fibre Channel or SATA storage in a single namespace and features a virtualization framework that simplifies the integration of storage into a consolidated server environment. Multi protocol support for both block- and file-level application data including iSCSI and NFS connectivity standards enables Titan to create seamless links between virtual storage file systems and virtual storage pools with thin provisioning for virtual machines.