19 You’ve already built a datacenter to manage your genomic archive and biotechnology research data. The costs of building a second one are probably too high. Why not use the cloud, instead? The biotech industry needs business continuity as much as any other business. The smartest way to achieve it is with a hybrid model: combining on-premise infrastructure with public cloud storage. You can then replicate your on-premise data in the public cloud for redundancy. You can even spin up applications in the cloud in case of a failure at your physical data center. With geographically-distributed cloud backups, disaster recovery (DR) can be more reliable for both immediate and longer term workloads, and can cost much less as an operating expense (versus a capital expense of a second physical data center). This white paper offers a use case with a real-world deployment of such a hybrid cloud DR solution using Scality RING and WekaIO. Our biopharmaceutical company client replaced two datacenters (based on EMC Isilon) with a combination of the WekaIO file system and Scality RING. Scality’s data management capability let our client run one datacenter on-premise with its data constantly replicated in the cloud. In case of emergency, a virtual datacenter with WekaIO in the cloud can be started with all the data already in place. While this paper focuses on DR, the specified hybrid model can also support archiving and service bursting (during peak demand for compute-intensive workloads), as well. Our client’s business relies on analyzing and researching genomic data. Every human has approximately three billion DNA base pairs; that’s a ton of data to store and use. Previously, the biopharmaceutical company used two on-premise datacenters, with EMC Isilon for file-based storage. As the company’s storage needs rose quickly, its system had trouble scaling and managing this file-based storage. As storage capacity neared 100 percent, backups were taking too long; too much effort and too many operational costs were going into managing and flattening the ever-increasing file system. This file system logjam also bottlenecked the amount of genomic data that could be added to the system, limiting the number of research studies that could be worked on in parallel. The company needed a better solution. To solve its business needs, our client chose a hybrid model, a combination of on-premises infrastructure in a single datacenter and Amazon Web Services resources. A large WekaIO cluster with 22 nodes is archived via Scality RING, giving the system the ability to manage up to 10 petabytes (PB) of data. This allowed the biopharmaceutical company to move away from a CAPEX model (owning and operating more physical data centers) to an OPEX model of renting space from cloud services. It gave them a more scalable, object-based storage solution that allowed for more scalability over time. Ultimately, this switch brought costs down and system capability up. Now the company can complete its research projects up to 12 times faster, handle any disaster recovery needs for much more data, and can call on more system resources in times of need (compute bursting). The benefits of a hybrid model are clear, as this case study shows. It provides more capacity and scalability at a much lower cost. Be sure to check out the full details here. Scality’s commitment to the scientific and healthcare industries runs deep: learn more about our tailored solutions here, check out our recent webcast with IDC about scale-out storage or take a dive deep on the boom in healthcare data. Still a cloud skeptic? Read on about who is really leading the cloud revolution.
