This week, DataDirects Networks said Stanford University’s Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine has selected the firm’s GridScaler parallel HPC and S2A6620 storage solutions to support its next-generation sequencing efforts.
The GridScaler file storage system allows DDN’s S2A6620 Extreme Storage to scale bandwidth to 200 gigabases. S2A6620 is a mid-range storage appliance that features up to 60 drives in 4U of rack space and delivers up to 335,000 IOPS from its 12 GB of mirrored, battery backed-up cache, and 2 GB of sustained bandwidth for large file throughput.
It scales up to 120 drives and has the ability to combine SATA, SAS, and SSD drives within a single appliance.
In benchmarks with an Illumina HiSeq 2000, the center reported a “marked performance gain” over existing workflows in production tests run with the DDN/Illumina workflow.
Specifically, Paul Bloch, DDN’s president, said in a statement that the combined systems "dramatically reduce the data reduction phase of the Illumina Casava pipeline.”
DDN also said its GridScaler and S2A6620 allow users to build IT infrastructure that meets their needs, without over-provisioning or being forced into a specific configuration, enabling them to focus on their research efforts.
Last month, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute tapped DDN’s technology to store its next-generation sequence data (BI 03/18/2011).