Accelerating Life Sciences
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Europe
Country
- United Kingdom
Product
- DDN's SFA10K EXAScaler storage appliance
- DDN's WOS Object Storage platform
- Illumina HiSeq and MiSeq sequencing machines
Tech Stack
- Lustre parallel file system
- iRODS
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Innovation Output
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
- Life Sciences
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Machine Condition Monitoring
Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Public Health England (PHE) is an executive agency of the Department of Health in the United Kingdom. Established in 2013, PHE's mission is to protect and improve the nation's health while reducing health inequalities. PHE employs more than 5,500 people, most of whom are scientists and public health professionals focused on making the public healthier through research, analysis and guidance to government entities as well as supporting action by local government, the National Health Service and other organisations. For example, PHE has been closely monitoring the 2014 Ebola Virus outbreak in West Africa, which is the largest known outbreak of this disease, to assess risk to the UK and ensure mechanisms are in place to detect and respond to any unusual infections nationwide.
The Challenge
Public Health England (PHE) was established to consolidate health specialists from over 70 organisations into a single public health service. PHE's mission is to protect and improve the nation's health while reducing health inequalities. PHE's MS bioinformatics unit has been involved in the establishment of a NextGeneration Sequencing (NGS) Service that provides the means to sequence the whole genomes of pathogens. This sequence can be used to characterise and type pathogens, which in turn can be used, for example, to identify and monitor outbreaks locally and nationally. The same sequence may also help scientists better understand the evolution of bacteria and viruses or predict trends in the patterns of antibiotic resistance. To better support its NGS analysis service, PHE MS sought a High-Performance Computing (HPC) system that would enable simultaneous processing of hundreds of bacteria samples received from hospitals and other stakeholders.
The Solution
To implement the ideal solution, PHE partnered with OCF, an integrator with a strong partner ecosystem and proven HPC expertise. Storage was a critical part of the decision process in terms of performance and resilience. It was complicated to take a position on storage, as the organisation had to have the right mix of software to cost-effectively achieve the required performance. The complexity of the software factored into the final decision, as well as how the system would be maintained, expanded and administered. As a result, PHE deployed DDN's SFA10K EXAScaler storage appliance with the Lustre parallel file system and 300TBs of highperformance storage. Together with OCF, the team worked to implement DDN's SFA highperformance storage system to support the massive amounts of research data that would be generated by their NGS service. Shortly after this deployment, PHE selected DDN's WOS Object Storage platform with 360TB of capacity to serve both as an active archive for valuable public data and as an offsite backup for its primary sites.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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