The Institute of Cancer Research, London: Driving the Future of Dynamic Adaptive Therapies
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Europe
Country
- United Kingdom
Product
- DDN’s GS7K®
- WOS object storage
Tech Stack
- VMware HorizonView
- NFS – ESXi Data Store
- iSCSI – ESXi and Windows servers
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Life Sciences
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
The Institute of Cancer Research, London, is one of the world’s most influential cancer research organizations, with an outstanding record of achievement dating back more than 100 years. The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) is led by Chief Executive, Professor Paul Workman — an expert in cancer drug discovery. It is a world leader in identifying cancer genes, discovering cancer drugs and developing precision radiotherapy. Together with hospital partner, The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, the pair is rated in the top four centers for cancer research and treatment worldwide. With 140 research teams focused on driving the future of dynamic adaptive therapies, ICR must be diligent in adapting support services.
The Challenge
The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London, a world leader in identifying cancer genes, discovering cancer drugs and developing precision radiotherapy, needed a single, central storage infrastructure that would enable users to collect and analyze all types of active research data. The research data service (RDS) had to be broad enough to support eight research divisions and all types of biology, chemistry and physics-related data. It needed to be able to pull in massive amounts of data from different scientific instruments and next-generation sequencers while connecting to various research services from laptops and desktops of every flavor, to high performance supercomputers with CPUs and GPUs.
The Solution
ICR set out to deploy a scalable solution that would host a wide range of scientific and clinical data. They chose DDN’s GS7K® as a stretched cluster with synchronous mirroring between sites. Additionally, 4PB of WOS object storage was installed to provide a tier that is protected using Global ObjectAssure® (GOA) advanced erasure coding. The sites are connected with private 10Gbps network links, with an option to increase bandwidth as needed. The infrastructure is extremely resilient with replication and erasure coding across three geographically separate locations, snapshots. The new RDS service is designed to be scalable, cost-effective, and highly resilient – an infrastructure scalable both in front-end performance and back-end capacity that can easily increase to meet changing demand.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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