Garvan Institute of Medical Research Uses Panasas ActiveStor Appliances

Panasas, Inc. announced the release of a customer case study on the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, an organization that has pioneered insights into some of the most widespread diseases affecting the world community.

One of the first to deploy the Illumina HiSeq X Ten sequencing platform, a system that produces up to 5TB of data per day, Garvan is using five Panasas ActiveStor appliances with a storage capacity of 400TB to drive faster delivery of results to researchers around the world.

To run the Illumina system at full capacity, Garvan needed to make changes to the existing infrastructure, most notably, implementing parallel processing. Garvan opted for Panasas storage with the PanFS parallel file system to provide its researchers with a storage solution able to deliver the fast data access needed to support the rapid prototyping and evaluation of specific analyses required for genomic sequencing. The Illumina sequencers combined with Panasas storage have increased Garvan’s sequencing capacity to 50 genomes per day on average – a fifty-fold improvement.

“Fundamental to our work is maintaining an extraordinary infrastructure that makes it all possible and Panasas is a key part of that,” said Dr. Warren Kaplan, chief of informatics, Garvan. “Panasas lives up to its promise of terrific performance with negligible maintenance and administration time. In addition, our sequencing data stays in the central repository throughout the analysis which makes for a more streamlined workflow, saving time and bandwidth.“

ActiveStor is an integrated solution consisting of hybrid storage hardware, file system and protocols, combined with triple parity protection. With ActiveStor, performance and data protection increase with scale to accelerate time-to-results for even the most demanding workloads. 8TB drive technology supports scalability to more than 20PB and 200GB/s, while RAID-6+ triple parity protection with per-file distributed software based on erasure codes provides a 150-fold increase in reliability over dual-parity approaches. Its enterprise-grade reliability and ease of installation and management further set ActiveStor apart.

“Having Garvan choose Panasas storage to support their important research is truly a privilege,” said Geoffrey Noer, VP of product management, Panasas. “Garvan needed a storage solution whose installation would not disrupt ongoing research, that could handle one of the most powerful sequencing platforms ever created, and that would boost the productivity of a research staff that grew from 10 to 80 people. We delivered a system that, once racked, was up and running on the same day, easily integrated into the Illumina HiSeq X Ten, and provided a workflow that increased performance and data throughput.“