Australian Queensland Brain Institute to Accelerate Brain Research With Brocade

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. announced that The University of Queensland’s Queensland Brain Institute will become the first organization in Australia to migrate to its Gen 6 FC storage networking solutions.

Brocade G620 switches will be deployed to provide the speed and performance the Queensland Brain Institute needs to eliminate data bottlenecks and accelerate research into preventing brain diseases such as dementia, Alzheimer’s, motor neuron disease, anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia.

Established in 2003, the institute is one of the world’s largest dedicated facilities focused on understanding how the brain works and finding ways to prevent diseases. While it has been successful in making major neuroscientific discoveries – with an Alzheimer’s breakthrough among the world’s most discussed medical research last year – the difficulty accessing, storing, and managing increasingly large data sets from brain imaging and microscopy devices is a constant consideration. Continuous improvement is important to ensure scientific research staff have a ‘zero friction’ experience in their workflows.

“Whole-brain imaging is critical to our research, but as advances in imaging and microscopy instruments continue to increase the resolutions and sampling rates of the data they generate, our storage infrastructure has new and unpredictable demands put upon it every day,” said Jake Carroll, senior IT manager (research), Queensland Brain Institute. “Brocade’s Gen 6 FC switches will provide a massive boost in our data transfer speeds to enable our scientists to get their job done seamlessly and efficiently.“

The G620 is a high-density storage networking switch that delivers performance and scalability designed to support data growth and demanding workloads from mission-critical applications. The Queensland Brain Institute will deploy G620 switches to form a redundant, low-latency storage network fabric with 32Gb/s links – which can be combined into a 128Gbp/s framed-based trunk – capable of dealing with the most demanding data flows. These switches will operate alongside the Brocade 6510 Gen 5 FC switches the Queensland Brain Institute is already using to handle its less demanding storage network requirements.

“We have to conduct increasingly complex experiments with rapidly growing data sets to make research breakthroughs, with researchers employing the latest imaging techniques and technologies, as well as running analysis against an increasing number of data points,” added Carroll. “With data already growing at several petabytes per year without any pattern, it’s very difficult to predict data growth going forward in a dynamic research computing environment. This puts a premium on storage network scalability – a requirement that Brocade’s Gen 6 FC technology is more than capable of meeting.“

The G620-based FC fabric is part of an integrated storage solution alongside storage arrays from Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS) and a high-end file server and preservation platform from Oracle Corp. (Hierarchical Storage Manager) to control the flow of data between storage layers. This next-generation storage infrastructure is designed to future-proof the institute by eliminating performance barriers and helping to deliver data processing on demand. This approach will enable scientists to have access to the data they need to carry out the institute’s research. It also provides governance and preservation layers in an increasingly complex sector, in regard to reproducibility and immutability.

“Gen 6 FC delivers a huge leap in performance for organizations with demanding big data environments like the Queensland Brain Institute, particularly in the face of its rapidly evolving brain imaging technology and increasing data needs,” said Jason Baden, senior director ANZ, Brocade. “Organizations can now confidently address performance, reliability, and scalability requirements for hyperscale virtualization, new data center architectures, and next-generation storage technologies.“