ICM Brain and Spine Institute Selecting Western Digital OpenFlex Solution

Western Digital Corp. announced that the Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Épinière (ICM Brain and Spine Institute), an international brain and spinal cord research center, has been selected to update its storage infrastructure with OpenFlex open composable platform.

Leveraging NVMe-oF, ICM has more extensive access to shared storage, which can be allocated to meet any researcher or department need. It also has quicker access to critical data and the ability to resize and reallocate storage volumes on demand, assisting in the fight vs. neurological disorders.

Scientists at ICM need to capture and analyze patient data from an array of clinical imaging tools and across different labs. Researchers have been hampered by an aging storage infrastructure that could not keep pace with their needs. The latest advanced microscopy instruments can generate up to 2TB of data every hour, which is far more than each workstation’s local storage can accommodate. This has created long delays at each step in the analysis pipeline, where scientists had to wait on the storage infrastructure to continue their work.

ICM worked with its technology partner 2CRSi to identify a new storage innovation that could provide the combination of performance and flexibility, selecting OpenFlex Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure.

OpenFlex provides ICM with fast storage performance within a more efficient and flexible architecture, allowing scientists to continually push their work forward without having to wait for storage. For ICM’s IT department, it means no longer having to squeeze in local storage close to workstations, or manually move storage around campus as projects change. Instead, they can distribute storage capacity over ICM’s Ethernet network wherever and whenever it’s needed, without sacrificing performance.

Kurt Chan, VP and GM, data center platforms, Western Digital said: “Today’s clinical workloads require fast, and highly reliable storage solutions to store massive amounts of research and patient data. As the clarity and resolution of clinical imaging increases, more bioimages need to be centrally stored to accelerate evaluations and diagnostics. Our OpenFlex open composable solution provides easy access to these large bioimaging files in near real-time, helping to speed up time to discovery of critical cures and treatment options.“

“Our scientists don’t want to worry about storage technology or IT infrastructure, and with OpenFlex, they don’t have to,” said Caroline Vidal, CTO, ICM. “We can provide fast, low-latency access to imaging data, in up to four times the resolution than researchers could work with before. The shared storage with NVMe-oF is just there when they need it, so they can focus on using the data and advancing their research.“

Benefits of Western Digital OpenFlex for ICM include: 

• Performance comparable to locally attached storage: Researchers can access performing storage in various capacities, at the maximum throughput that ICM’s 50Gb/s Ethernet links can deliver. The solution also assures the low latencies needed when working with high-resolution image files. ICM reported 34μs or less for most storage operations.
• Faster time to discovery: OpenFlex performance has a direct impact on ICM researchers’ lifesaving work, eliminating delays and interruptions in the analysis pipeline. ICM scientists can analyze and verify more clinical images per day, in up to 4x the resolution than was possible before, and retrieve archived datasets when needed. As a result, they can advance their understanding of neurological disease processes and develop novel therapies more quickly.
• Architectural flexibility: With OpenFlex, ICM’s IT team can allocate storage to meet any researcher’s need and resize and reallocate storage volumes on demand. This flexibility is essential as the institute adds more microscopes and other instruments in the coming years, continually driving up the resolutions and volumes of clinical imaging data.
• Efficient, cost-effective operation: With storage centralized in the data center over a fabric, ICM’s IT team can manage the solution more easily. Maintenance and software updates take less time and effort, an operational saving compared to managing dozens of storage servers distributed across the campus. Additionally, because storage is centralized, any new microscopes added can use the same pool of capacity, eliminating the ongoing capital expense of deploying more local storage for each new device.

Western Digital continuously pushes the boundaries of science and technology, to deliver products that enable greater data infrastructure efficiency and productivity with TCO. Its data center portfolio includes its family of Ultrastar HDDs and SSDs; WD Gold HDDs and SSDs; OpenFlex NVMe-oF open composable infrastructure; Ultrastar storage platforms; RapidFlex NVMe-oF controllers; and the Ultrastar memory extension drive. Western Digital is also championing Zoned Storage, an open-source, standards-based initiative building upon the synergies of SMR HDDs and ZNS SSDs that enables data centers to scale efficiently.

Founded in 2010, the Brain and Spine Institute is a scientific and medical research center of international excellence, located in Paris, France at the heart of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. Its model brings doctors, researchers, patients and entrepreneurs together in one place with a common objective: to understand the brain and accelerate the discovery of new treatments for diseases of the nervous system. The institute includes a network of more than 700 researchers and clinicians, 10 cutting-edge technological platforms, a clinical investigation center and 1,000m² intended for incubation of start-ups. Since 2017, the ICM has also been Station F’s first health partner; this establishment offers it a competitive advantage in the field of connected health. This year, the Institute celebrates its tenth anniversary.

Founded in Strasbourg (France), 2CRSi group develops, produces and sells customised and environmentally friendly servers. In the FY19/20, the group achieved pro forma turnover of €144.6 million. It today has 352 employees and markets its offer of solutions (processing, storage and network) in more than 45 countries. It has been listed since June 2018 on the regulated market of Euronext in Paris (ISIN Code: FR0013341781) and is included in the European Rising Tech label.

Case study: ICM Brain & Spine Institute Breaks the Storage Bottleneck for Life Sciences Computing