Progenity Opts for Qumulo Hybrid Cloud File Storage

Data is a strategic resource that can differentiate research companies from their competition. To keep up, organizations are under pressure to find better ways to expand and manage their storage infrastructure.

The amount of data generated, processed, and stored in a typical genome sequencing project, is astounding; it’s not uncommon for a single lab to generate more than a billion files in a year.

Progenity, Inc. is a privately-held biotechnology company that provides clinicians with complex molecular and specialized diagnostic tests for women’s health, reproductive medicine, and oncology.

Over the years, its work in genetic sequencing has generated more than a billion files, and its data volumes are growing, according to David Meiser, solutions architect for Linux and Windows applications, Progenity.

“After a few years with our original storage system, we realized that the way the company worked wasn’t a good model for us,” he said, referring to both its high costs and storage efficiencies. “One problem was that there was significant file overhead. The files we write are very small, and the block size of our old storage system was very large. We found that we couldn’t do analysis in-place because the access times were super high.“

Progenity selected Qumulo’s hybrid cloud file storage system, an affordable solution, without sacrificing performance or scalability. The system also runs both on-prem and in the public cloud, another advantage, as Progenity is planning for an eventual migration to the cloud.

Meiser estimated that, conservatively, Progenity saves 13% on storage space with Qumulo compared to its previous vendor, but noted that the actual savings is probably more between 17 and 20%.

“We’ve been exceedingly happy with the answers we’ve gotten from Qumulo at all levels. One of the biggest selling points is having a Slack channel where I can immediately get in touch with Qumulo Care for any sort of question, whether it’s big or small. We use that feature a lot and we really love it,” said Meisner. 

Why Qumulo:

• Efficient Management of Small Files: Qumulo’s file system was designed to handle small files as efficiently as large files. This removes the block size limitations applied with other scale-out NAS solutions, which potentially leads to huge capacity wastage.
• Real-Time Visibility: Ability to provide real-time visibility into data usage, including hot spots and inefficiencies, has proven to be an important benefit. Meiser said: “As we were migrating from the legacy system to Qumulo, we were able to figure out which files the R&D folks could delete so we weren’t wasting storage.“
• Multi-Protocol Support: Qumulo’s support of both NFS and SMB protocols was another advantage for Progenity. Meiser also said: “We’ve got to be able to write data over SMB and read that data back over NFS. That’s our big story for how we analyze data.“