Genomics England Has Selected WekaIO

WekaIO, Inc. announced that Genomics England Limited (GEL) has selected its File System (WekaFS) to accelerate genomics research for the 5 million Genomes project.

Genomics England chose WekaFS to meet the predicted capacity scaling that will be required over the coming five years while delivering the highest performance to its DNA pipeline.

What is Genome
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Genomics England is owned by the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care and tasked to run the 5 million Genomes project. This project aims to sequence 5 million genomes from National Health Service (NHS) patients with rare diseases, their families, and patients with common cancers. With the support of the public, it is creating a lasting legacy for patients. With a vision for genomic medicine in the NHS, including plans to sequence 5 million genomes over the next 5 years, it is setting the stage for new scientific discovery and significant medical insight.

After an evaluation process, Genomics England chose WekaIO as it was the only vendor that could meet the performance and capacity scaling requirements within the projected budget constraints. In addition, the institute needed a system that could deliver a complete enterprise feature set, with high levels of security and public cloud integration. It was the only vendor that met all of the requirements of the RFP while also delivering the best cost economics.

“The Genomics England cluster required a new solution to allow scaling of the company’s DNA data bank in line with the anticipated five-year growth. Already at 25PB, our legacy storage system had already reached its limit and performance had deteriorated,” said David Ardley, director of technology, Genomics England. “We needed a modern storage solution that could scale to 100s of petabytes while maintaining performance scaling, and it had to be simple to manage at that scale. With its clever combination of flash for performance and object store for scale, Weka has proven to be a great solution.“

“As an independent data services integrator, Nephos looked at the market to find the best fit for Genomics England’s requirement and Weka stood out head and shoulders above the rest for delivering a modern file system to better assist life sciences organizations,” said Michael Queenan, co-founder and director at Nephos Technologies Ltd, a Weka Innovation Network partner.

“Genomics England is leading the charge on the research front by using our technology leadership to achieve a leap in application performance that is far beyond the capabilities of any legacy parallel file system. The Weka File System has delivered a 10x performance improvement over GEL’s legacy NFS-based NAS and is enabling more effective use of existing cloud infrastructure. The Weka File System will improve overall productivity and empower researchers to become more efficient at analyzing results,” said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO, WekaIO.

WekaFS is a parallel and distributed file systemdesigned to leverage both flash technology and cost-effective disk storage. Data and metadata are both distributed across the entire storage infrastructure to ensure parallel access to NVMe drives. Data is tiered from flash to disk with internal tiering mechanism, achieving the optimum use of storage media for best economics.

Genomics England case study