Pure Storage, the IT pioneer providing the world’s most advanced data storage technologies and services, today announced that the Australian Genome Research Facility (AGRF), Australia’s largest provider of genomics services and solutions, leverages Pure Storage’s FlashBlade® that is a Unified Fast File and Object (UFFO) storage solution to accelerate data performance and reduce genomic pipeline turnaround times for global customers.
Customer Challenge:
Serving 15,000 customers worldwide, AGRF partners with the genomics community to provide innovative and integrated capabilities in biomedical, clinical, agricultural and environmental fields. Having been at the center of COVID-19 research and critical conservation efforts for Australia’s threatened species, AGRF’s genomic science solutions are focused on fundamentally improving people’s everyday lives through data.
However, genome sequencing generates massive amounts of data and metadata that require a scalable, reliable, and high-performance storage infrastructure. In fact, AGRF generates over 10 terabytes of raw data every week, which roughly quadruples before returning to customers.
Impact on the customer:
To manage these large amounts of raw data and provide fast, low-cost sequencing services, AGRF replaced its existing scale-out file system technology, which was difficult to manage, unstable, complex and expensive, with Pure Storage FlashBlade to increase metadata performance, storage capacity and ultimately optimizing its end-to-end sequencing pipeline.
By migrating its existing workloads to FlashBlade, AGRF gained increased I/O and bandwidth, all with lower latency, allowing compute jobs to complete faster and increasing the company’s computing power without impacting capacity. With the support of FlashBlade, AGRF has reduced its clinical genome sequencing time by up to 86% – from 28 days to just 10 days and in urgent cases to just four days. Additionally, the company reduced the time it takes to complete the most important initial phase of its analytics workflow from 18 hours to 3 hours, a 6x performance increase, while another subsequent phase of the workflow went from 10 hours to just 23 minutes was shortened to a 26-fold increase in performance.
Executive insight:
“FlashBlade’s simplicity and scalability not only allows us to run our sequencing analysis workflow quickly and smoothly, but the increased performance allows us to introduce new technologies to support general computing functionality. In addition, FlashBlade can connect directly to sequencers, including Illumina, to ingest the raw sequenced data, greatly improving AGRF’s on-site workflows. Now we are able to deliver results faster, leading to important decisions being made sooner while also taking on more life-saving projects.” – Douglas Morrison, ICT Manager, Australian Genome Research Facility (AGRF)
