Children’s Hospital Boston With Isilon IQ

Isilon Systems, Inc. announced that Children’s Hospital Boston, the world’s largest pediatric research center, has deployed Isilon scale-out NAS to centralize the general-purpose file storage for its more than two thousand researchers.

Using Isilon IQ, featuring its One FS operating system, Children’s Hospital has created a single, highly scalable, shared pool of storage to provide its research staff with immediate, around-the-clock access to massive file-based data archives, while requiring less than one-third of one full-time equivalent (FTE) to manage the system. Additionally, using Isilon’s asynchronous data replication software SyncIQ, Children’s Hospital replicates file-based information between two Isilon IQ 36NL clusters, improving overall data reliability and eliminating this data’s impact on overall hospital IT backup operations.

"Our researchers depend on a diverse amount of information in creating new treatments for the many serious illnesses facing children around the world," said Ryan Callahan, manager of research computing, Children’s Hospital Boston. "As such, their data needs to be immediately available, anytime, anywhere. This is simply impossible with traditional storage, which is both cost-prohibitive at scale and incapable of keeping pace with rapid data growth. We chose Isilon because it’s simple, cost-effective and scalable, allowing us to create an easy-to-use ‘bucket’ of information our researchers can draw on whenever, wherever they need."

As continued advances in life sciences research technology create unprecedented data growth, Children’s Hospital found its traditional SAN storage systems were incapable of keeping pace. This placed significant strain on the hospital’s data backup operations, which were being bottlenecked by the rapid influx of new research information, and limited the hospital’s ability to rapidly grow storage quotas without sacrificing retention service level agreements. Additionally, because much of Children’s Hospital’s research data must be immediately available for the entirety of any patient’s life or project’s duration, the hospital faced significant storage management challenges as it attempted to scale its previous SAN system to accommodate its massive data archives.

By deploying Isilon scale-out NAS, Children’s Hospital unified its entire repository of file-based research data, enabling the hospital to grow its storage on-demand without any system downtime, ensuring this critical information is immediately available 24x7x365. With two Isilon IQ 36NL clusters running SyncIQ across more than 250 terabytes (TB) of capacity, Children’s Hospital eliminated the impact of research data growth on the hospital’s overall backup operations, creating significant time and cost savings across the organization, while at the same time improving data reliability.

"Children’s Hospital is a world leader in advancing the state of pediatric care. Its decision to trust Isilon with a wealth of mission-critical data is a testament to our ability to simply, reliably and cost-effectively store invaluable information," said Sam Grocott, senior director of product management, Isilon Systems. "With Isilon IQ, Children’s Hospital now has a central storage repository capable of seamlessly integrating with its heterogeneous environment and enabling levels of data access, efficiency and cost reduction that were impossible with its traditional SAN system."