NIH National Center for Biotechnology Information Deploys FileTek StorHouse

FileTek, Inc., provider of large-scale data management and information governance solutions, announced that the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary Federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research, recently purchased and deployed multiple FileTek StorHouse storage virtualization and data management systems as an active archive and backup solution for storing, accessing, and protecting all critical NCBI Short Read Archive (SRA) data. SRA data is next-generation genomic sequencing information produced at numerous bioinformatic research facilities and centers throughout the United States. The information is then written to StorHouse and made available to a prestigious, global biomedical research community.

Currently, NCBI/NIH has deployed two production StorHouse systems and two backup/disaster recovery StorHouse systems at geographically dispersed locations in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. The long-range, two-year plan is to grow these installations to dozens of StorHouse instances in multiple locations to accommodate the anticipated 12-petabyte archive size. In addition, StorHouse is responsible for storing and backing up vital SRA project information created at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.

FileTek wishes to acknowledge Cambridge Computer of Waltham, MA, for its role in helping the NIH Medical Library identify StorHouse as the best fit for the NCBI’s technical requirements. “The NCBI storage repository is the most exciting storage project in the bioinformatics world today,” commented Jacob Farmer, CTO of Cambridge Computer. “This system will be storing and protecting 12 petabytes of genomic sequencing data gathered from research sites across the country. FileTek’s StorHouse has several unique features that made it stand out as the optimal choice for managing what is undoubtedly the most important cache of life sciences data in the world today.”

"FileTek is pleased that NCBI/NIH chose StorHouse for its groundbreaking SRA application,” remarked Chuck Whinney, the FileTek General Manager for StorHouse. “When faced with the ultimate challenge of designing the SRA application, NCBI/NIH realized early on that StorHouse met all system requirements, including ensuring data integrity, facilitating data access, and scaling to petabytes and beyond to support future growth. Furthermore, because the StorHouse systems at NCBI/NIH are media/hardware agnostic and use a blend of cost-effective storage options, they also provide lower storage and data management costs. As the SRA initiative progresses, FileTek looks forward to pursuing more projects at NIH and at other biomedical research centers around the world.”

About StorHouse
StorHouse is an intelligent, hardware agnostic, storage virtualization and data management platform for archiving, retrieving, and backing up large volumes of relational and file-based information. The system supports an automatically managed pool of traditional and alternative storage devices, including tape, disk, solid state devices, and most other generally available storage technologies. Enterprises deploy StorHouse as an integral component of an overall enterprise storage infrastructure for active archive applications, database extension systems, information lifecycle management initiatives, digital preservation programs, and native file format backups of terabytes to petabytes of data residing on operational systems.

StorHouse has many unique features that support biomedical research applications such as the SRA program at NCBI/NIH.

These features include:

• All-in-one platform functionality that provides both archive and backup capabilities
• An industry-standard relational file system layer that archives, retrieves, and/or backs up any format of unstructured data in native file format with no need for application modifications
• Scalability to trillions of files and multiple petabytes of managed data with no performance degradation
• A native file format backup approach that eliminates the need for traditional restore processing
• Virtualized storage that cost-effectively uses traditional and alternative storage media to lower the total cost of data ownership and provide a measurable, cost-correct ROI
• Automated system, storage, and data management, including storage allocation and control as well as data migration, replication, backup, recovery, and retention
• Automatic content validation and repair processes to ensure data integrity and archive reliability
• Easy migration to newer and more advanced technology as it becomes available with no performance degradation