UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging With Isilon

Isilon Systems, Inc. announced that the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI), home of the world’s largest collection of research neuroimages, has deployed Isilon scale-out storage to power its research into Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and other brain disorders.

Using Isilon’s SmartPools software, LONI has unified three performance tiers of Isilon scale-out storage into a single file system, simplifying data management to drive increased efficiency, cost-savings and application performance. With SmartPools, LONI has consolidated all of its file-based operations onto a central, shared storage pool, aligning application needs with system resources to improve utilization and reduce costs.

"Our lab supports data-intensive research initiatives the world over, making efficient data management key to our success," said David Hasson, director of IT, LONI. "As a result of implementing SmartPools, we’ve maintained our ability to fine-tune even the lowest level of granularity, while obviating the need to micromanage the storage cluster. It’s an incredible boon for productivity and has allowed us to focus more time on addressing the many other technical facets of our institution, which has ultimately led to a tremendous increase in research."

"With so many different resource requests to fill, the simpler our infrastructure is to manage, the better we can support the lab’s initiatives," said JD Trout, IT manager for infrastructure, UCLA LONI. "Isilon makes our jobs easier, especially with SmartPools, as there’s only one system to manage, regardless of tiers, size or application."

Leveraging its 5,000-plus compute-core Linux cluster and massive repository of 2D and 3D neuroimages, LONI supports an international research community with sophisticated image analysis, web-based image access and a variety of analytic tools and research best practices. LONI deployed Isilon’s SmartPools application to unify its three performance tiers into a single file system and point of management, driving increased simplicity and efficiency across its data center. With SmartPools, LONI has eliminated manual data migration between storage tiers, reducing overall system management to less than an hour per week and improving data access for its diverse ecosystem of research groups, collaborating scientists and partner organizations.

"Data I/O performance is, undoubtedly, the quintessential element in processing ever-growing image sets using our particular applications and workflows. At the same time, being able to dynamically throttle that performance based on demand is imperative both to reducing operating costs and making sure our researchers are getting the performance they need, when they need it," said Jonathan Pierce, manager of high performance computing, LONI. "By utilizing Isilon’s SmartPools, we’ve been able to automate movement of data across tiers to optimize performance, while simultaneously reducing the amount of high-performance storage we need, thereby reducing our cost of operation. I cannot state emphatically enough how much of a blessing this new system has been."

"LONI has long been at the leading-edge of the neurosciences, setting the standard for how best to study and improve our understanding of the human brain," said Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing, Isilon. "By using Isilon’s SmartPools to simplify its IT operations and improve efficiency, LONI is establishing best practices in data management and providing further validation of Isilon’s ability to increase productivity and reduce costs."