Scalable, high-performance storage powers Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute’s worldwide research

As one of the top five scientific institutions in the world specializing in DNA sequencing, Sanger Institute embraces the latest technologies to research the genetic basis of global health problems, including cancer, malaria, diabetes, obesity and infectious diseases.

In order to manage the massive surge in the volume of data required to evaluate genetic sequences, Sanger Institute selected DDN’s SFA® high-performance storage engine and EXAScaler™ Lustre® file system appliance to deliver unprecedented levels of throughput and scalability to support tens of thousands of data sequences requiring up to 10,000 CPU hours of computational analysis.

With more than 2,000 scientists around the world, DDN SFA storage will also help facilitate data access and sharing including for those who access data through the Sanger Institute’s website, which results in 20 million hits and 12 million impressions each week.

As the 30 DNA sequencers in Sanger Institute’s Illumina Production Sequencing core facility each pump out about one terabyte of data daily, with DDN technology the Sanger Institute has an easy-to-manage, integrated system that offers unparalleled scalability to address both complex computing problems and ever-changing collaboration requirements associated with its leading-edge research.

DDN’s proven experience serving some of the world’s fastest computers ensures that the Sanger Institute can deliver the highest levels of compute performance and throughput, as well as maximum system uptime, to optimize the latest sequencing technologies. This is critical as today’s sequencers produce a million times more data than those used a decade ago.

Moreover, the institute now can provide its diverse scientific community with an essential tool for leveraging its approximately £80 million research budget to the fullest in order to further the exploration of groundbreaking scientific and medical discoveries.
DDN Flexible, High Performance Infrastructure Supports Diverse Research Workloads

With DDN storage, the Sanger Institute can achieve its goal of supporting different research workloads with a wide range of computational analysis and storage requirements while being able to expand quickly and without disruption.

Since installing its initial SFA storage platform, the Sanger Institute keeps pace with ever-increasing computational and analytical demands by taking advantage of DDN’s ongoing performance increases to achieve speeds of up to 20 GBps, which enables meeting the needs of the most demanding workloads.

To accommodate demands for increased bandwidth, Sanger Institute is upgrading its 10GbE network to 40GbE and plans to scale its current DDN storage to support expanded network capacity.

Additionally, Sanger Institute is exploring DDN WOS® distributed object storage platform, which could be ideal for increased collaboration and data sharing as part of a private cloud.