Biomedical Institutes Select SwiftStack Object Storage to Accelerate the Translation of Discoveries into Cures

 Email This Post

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – April 7, 2016 — /BackupReview.info/ — SwiftStack, the leader in a new breed of object storage for enterprise, is fundamentally changing the way the life sciences industry manages its research data and consumes storage. Research organizations such as Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology and Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation now rely on SwfitStack to enable innovations that help them achieve breakthroughs in research involving genome sequencing within their existing their IT budgets.

“Scientists and researchers create an immense amount of information and, not surprisingly, they want to keep all of it for an eternity,” said Chris Dagdigian, BioTeam co-founder and director of technology. “The enormous amount of data that is created or easily downloaded by one scientist or an entire lab can overwhelm traditional enterprise storage platforms. Life science storage requires nearly infinite capacity, multiple access paths to the actual data while avoiding unnecessary hardware and management costs.”

Life science organizations accelerate research using object storage in private clouds
Experiencing limits with existing storage infrastructure, SwiftStack customers are meeting their business goals of aligning the cost of their infrastructure with their research mission to translate discoveries into cures by ensuring access to this research data from anywhere. SwiftStack’s object storage software offering enables customers to manage and retain custody of billions of data objects, despite tightly controlled budgets and resource-constrained IT staff.

? Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) is a non-profit biomedical research institute that found it could integrate SwiftStack software into its existing environment using commodity hardware while avoiding the expense of external arrays and tape and their associated maintenance costs. “What sold me on the SwiftStack solution is the cost savings, pay-as-yougrow, and that it meets our growing demands in a cost-effective way without adding staff,” said Brent Keck, chief Information officer, OMRF.

? Dirk Petersen, scientific computing director at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute, said that he was able to deploy an object-based workflow for archive data without sacrificing performance. “Our multi-petabyte storage-as-a-service now hosts hundreds of affiliated researchers and gives everyday users access to the data,” said Petersen. “Our initial deployment of 300TB using SwiftStack’s software-defined storage saved us $700,000 from the start, and its automation allowed us to roll-out storage nodes in 10 minutes.”

“Genomic data has to be stored indefinitely because some data might require future reprocessing or must be retained due to the rarity of the associated samples,” explained Jose Alvarez, director of life sciences and research computing at Cambridge Computer Services. “To solve the storage problem, IT leaders, scientists and administrators are increasingly aligning around the business case for deploying open, scalable and easy-to-maintain storage solutions that can grow as needed without having to invest a lot of money up front.”

Joe Arnold, chief product officer and co-founder of SwiftStack, summarized the need for these bioinformatics organizations to address the twin goals of innovating in research and overcoming limits of legacy infrastructure. “The rapid innovation in genomic sequencing is generating data at a rate that has outpaced the falling costs of traditional storage. With petabyte-scale the new norm, object storage is the only approach that both addresses cost and enables researchers to use tagging with metadata to improve their data management.”

Additional Resources
? www.swiftstack.com/genomics
? SwiftStack for Life Sciences Solution Sheet
? Object Storage for Genomics by Joe Arnold
? OMRF and SwiftStack Case Study (text)
? OMRF and SwiftStack Case Study (video)
? Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Video Testimonial
? HudsonAlpha Video Testimonial
? Medical Research and SwiftStack Case Study

About SwiftStack
SwiftStack innovations power object storage for Enterprises, offering freedom of choice for genuine simplicity and TCO at scale. SwiftStack has perfected the delivery of private cloud object storage within and across data centers for content delivery, active archive, and data-centric workflows. The SwiftStack solution, built on OpenStack Swift at its core, is managed by a unique out-of-band controller and includes scale-out nodes with rolling upgrades as well as a filesystem gateway interface for traditional applications. No object storage solution is as flexible, simple, or open as SwiftStack, which has driven adoption by HP, PayPal and AutoDesk among many F500 companies. Connect with us on Twitter and LinkedIn, or please visit www.swiftstack.com.

Contact:
Katie Schaeffer
swiftstack@touchdownpr.com
US: + 1 (512) 765-6081

Source: SwiftStack

Tags: Fred Hutchinson, Hudson Alpha, Oklahoma Medical Research, SwiftStack