SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Chooses WekaFS

WekaIO, Inc. announced that the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics has selected the Weka File System (WekaFS) to ensure data security with zero application performance degradation.

Sib Swiss Institute Of Bioinformatics

SIB chose this vendor because it provides a secure HPC and storage platform that prevents unauthorized users from accessing sensitive personal biodata while ensuring immediate access to the same data for authorized researchers who use it to accelerate research for critical public health issues, such as cancer or diabetes. Since installing WekaFS, SIB supports a growing number of projects on the cluster, in particular, because the researchers can trust the security of the sensitive data.

SIB is a Swiss-based, internationally recognized center of expertise in data science that is dedicated to biological data. It provides life scientists and clinicians with essential databases and custom-made tools, computational biology expertise, secure services for sensitive data, as well as bioinformatics training.

A non-profit foundation, the institute also represents the Swiss bioinformatics community by federating about 800 data scientists in the country and fostering collaboration among them. As part of its infrastructure activities, it develops a nationwide project called BioMedIT, aiming to implement a secure IT network to support biomedical research and clinical bioinformatics.

One of the three nodes of this network, the Romandie infrastructure at SIB, operates a platform that offers biomedical researchers a service for the processing of sensitive data. In this context, cybersecurity and trust are of utmost importance.

DALCO AG, a Weka Innovation Network (WIN) accelerator partner headquartered in Volketswil, Switzerland, lent its expertise to architect a clustered file system for SIB that would encrypt data for security without compromising on the performance required for research. The challenge was to find a parallel file system that provided the combination of encryption for security, shared data accessibility for authorized users only, and performance for applications. SIB had evaluated other file systems but none met the data shareability and encryption-in-flight requirements.

WekaFS was installed on an 8-node, on-premises storage cluster to serve data to a GPU-enabled, multi-tenant OpenStack cluster. OpenStack pools the virtual resources into a private cloud and WekaFS is used to mount it for different tenants. Data is tiered from the NVMe layer to 500TB of Red Hat Ceph object storage.

“We were looking for an HPC storage system that would be easy to manage and fully protect data with encryption at rest and in-flight, all while maintaining the highest performance,” says Dr. Heinz Stockinger, head of the core-IT department, SIB. “With Weka, we can provide a storage solution for Swiss hospitals and other data providers. It offers secure access to patient data as well as the performance required by research groups. The trust that we have gained to provide a secure environment for sensitive health data has enabled us to increase the number of research projects on the platform.“

“The challenge for SIB was to find a solution that would protect the data from unauthorized access and simultaneously accelerate GPU performance and application performance for the researchers,” said Pascal Suter, CTO, DALCO. “The Weka parallel file system was architected from the ground up to empower the modern datacenter, with flash optimization and seamless tiering to object storage on- premises or in the public cloud. As it delivers unsurpassed bandwidth to GPU servers, Weka was the best HPC storage solution for SIB.“

The complete solution has allowed SIB to support the varied workloads of its healthcare and research community and embed data encryption in-flight for security without compromising performance. In addition to ease of management with its GUI, WekaFS provides authentication services that restrict data access to authorized users only, including shared access using Weka’s private cloud multi-tenancy capability. Weka reduces management with automated tiering to object storage via an S3 gateway and delivers performance and high bandwidth to accelerate research and discovery. SIB has enhanced the security of its infrastructure and also realized several benefits, including an increase in trust from partners and more data on the platform.

“We couldn’t be happier to be a core component of SIB’s infrastructure and to help accelerate life science research to improve the lives of people,” added Ken Grohe, president and CRO, WekaIO. “Weka is the de-facto storage solution that solves big problems for the most active research companies in healthcare, pharma, biotech, and genomics. WekaFS uses a shared storage architecture that eliminates any GPU performance bottlenecks and scales without limits. With integrated tiering to object storage and a simple, intuitive management interface, Weka is as easy to use as it is powerful.“

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