London Institute of Cancer Research Uses SGI DMF Software and Storage

Silicon Graphics International Corp.
announced that the company’s storage and archiving solutions continue to gain
market momentum as more customers recognize the value of implementing
multi-tiered storage strategies to deal with data growth.

With a range
of integrated hardware and SGI DMF software that can create and automatically
manage tiered virtual storage environments, customers from media companies to
genomics and university researchers are adopting SGI storage and active
archiving solutions to reduce equipment and operating costs while managing and
monetizing their data-intensive workloads.

At the London-based Institute
of Cancer Research (ICR), DMF software and other SGI storage products are
used to provide tiered data access for one of the independent cancer research
organizations. With the active archive virtualized between two sites, five
kilometers apart in London, DMF and other SGI storage tools provide researchers
immediate access to online data archives for the performance compute
environments for next generation sequence applications and protein discovery
network applications.

"SGI provides us with the complete tool-set
required to support the diverse, high-end computational challenges faced by our
institute," said John Lockley, head of scientific computing at the Institute of Cancer Research.

What makes
this and the other large data environments work is that SGI storage technology
is designed for real-world active archiving and simplified asset retrieval at
any scale.

"Customers such as ICR are dealing with an
explosion of data that creates serious challenges to cost effectively manage
work flows," said Jose Reinoso, vice president of storage engineering
at SGI. "By leveraging the power of
SGI storage solutions with features such as Parallel DMF, these researchers and
scientists are able to focus on their primary mission and not struggle with
data management issues."

The power of
these large distributed systems is also available in an integrated solution
with SGI ArcFiniti, an integrated active archive solution. Mountain View,
California-based Complete
Genomics, Inc. recently deployed ArcFiniti to manage one petabyte of data
as next-generation sequencers are deployed and as resulting massive file sets
are created.

"Easy, fast access to archival data is
essential to provide top level service to our customers," said Bruce
Martin, senior vice president of development at Complete Genomics. "After comparing conventional disk arrays,
tape libraries and cloud-based offerings, this solution provided us with the
lowest cost, highest performance and best ease of use. ArcFiniti was the best
solution for our needs."

Whether it
is in genomics, weather forecasting, biosciences, or media and entertainment,
the same tools can be brought to bear to enable some of the largest and most
dynamic active archives to function on a daily basis.