Support Data-Intensive Workflows With Automated, Intelligent Migration and Archiving

Pharmaceutical companies invest heavily in research and development to create new drugs and medicines in order to treat the ailments of today’s global society. Success brings many benefits but research is a slow, expensive and highly competitive proposition. Research priorities now require accelerated analysis of lab data and fast decision-making based on integration, assimilation and examination of multidisciplinary data. Hitachi Data Systems storage solutions deliver hardware and advanced storage management features to meet the challenges of today’s data-intensive life sciences organizations.

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Both large and small organizations can benefit from our hardware-accelerated architecture, which sup-ports scaling without compromising performance. Our data management software simplifies many day-to-day administration tasks and helps provide shared data access to the many individuals and workgroups who need it. It can also improve the performance of computational workflows by virtualizing storage serv-ers to transparently shift workloads across various physical servers.

To address long-term data management issues, our solutions offer automated intelligent data migration and integrated archive functionality. This approach allows organizations to optimize the use of their higher performance storage.

High-Performance NAS Accelerates Life Sciences Research

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DISCOVER

SOLUTION PROFILE

New Requirements Demand New SolutionsLife sciences research is heavily compute and data intensive, which has been the case since the sequencing of the human genome was completed 10 years ago. But there are significant differences today, including:

■■ Volumes of data have increased by orders of magnitude over the last few years, driven in part by the race to achieve the $1,000 genome sequence.

■■ High-performance computing clusters have brought supercomputing power to even the smallest labs, keeping cluster processors satiated to sus-tain high-throughput computational workflows.

■■ The multidisciplinary nature of life sci-ences research means that there is a much greater need to provide shared access to lab data and various public and private databases.

These changes have had a considerable impact to the proliferation of data and its resulting management requirements. Workloads are quite variable and place changing demands on storage systems. To address these challenges, we provide scal-able storage and data management solutions to ensure workflows run unimpeded, in a cost-effective manner (see Figure 1).

New Lab Equipment Drives Data GrowthLife sciences data volumes are exploding due to the wider use of higher resolution imaging and sequencing in labs today.

On the imaging front, there is growing use of microscopy in basic research and develop-ment, as well as in early stage clinical trials. There is also an increased use of microarrays for single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) detection and gene expression profiling.

Expanded use of higher-resolution imaging in high-performance research drives the need for high-performance and cost- effective storage solutions to complement increasing computing power used for analy-sis of imaging data.

Accelerate Life Sciences ResearchLife sciences continue to experience explosive growth of raw experimental and calculated data. There is greater use of high-throughput computational workflows and the growing adoption of new data reuse, mining and retention practices. This environment places new demands on the way life sciences organizations store and manage their data.

On the sequencing front, next-generation sequencers produce orders of magnitude more data per run than their predecessors. Each run can be done in a faster time and the cost per run is decreasing. Also, these experiments result in more data than with previous generation sequencers. Essentially, the lower cost and faster run times mean more completed experiments in a given period of time, making it difficult to manage the sequencing data.

Changing Nature of Research Creates New DemandsTo address the life sciences data explosion, organizations in the past would simply add raw storage capacity. However, that is not the best solution today.

As the volume of data and capabilities of high-performance computing (HPC) resources grow, meeting growing stor-age capacity and performance demands becomes a challenge. It is difficult to meet these needs while minimizing the burden of managing the expanding volumes of data.

Life sciences research is a multidisciplinary effort, which adds to data management challenges. Many researchers using vastly different systems and data analysis routines need shared access to lab results and sub-scribed databases.

As numerous blockbuster drugs come off patent, life sciences organizations today routinely look at past research on these already approved drugs to find new indica-tions for them. Therefore, researchers often need access to older data, which in the past would have been archived and taken offline.

Making matters more complex, regulatory and new patient safety requirements dictate retention of more data for longer periods. Now, for responsible data management you must decide which data gets stored on which systems at a particular point in the data’s lifetime.

Figure 1. Genomic Sequencing Environment With Shared Storage

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Hitachi NAS Platform features improved performance, manageability and availability of NAS workloads as well as enhanced integration with VMware high-availability and testing environments.

Additionally, life sciences research is now typically conducted in a more operationally efficient manner. Previously, scientists cut and pasted data from one spreadsheet or database into another for analysis. However, today’s workflows can automatically use results from one analysis or computation as input to another. This capability places demands on the storage systems and their interactions with HPC resources.

Storage Solutions Designed for Today’s Life Sciences ResearchHitachi NAS Platform (HNAS), our high-performance NAS technology, fea-tures improved integration with VMware high-availability and testing environments. With HNAS, Hitachi Data Systems provides improved performance, manageability and availability of NAS workloads.

HNAS supports intelligent tiered storage and the ability to transparently move data from tier to tier. Its single file system presentation for the hosts, end users and applications eliminates the need for changes, such as redirecting an application to a new drive or volume when a file is moved.

Our approach to intelligent tiered storage allows online, nearline and archival data to reside on any combination of solid state, Fibre Channel, SAS and SATA disks. Also, Hitachi Data Systems networked storage systems automatically and intelligently migrate data across various tiers using policies that the storage administrator establishes. These policies can be based on a wide range of parameters, such as previous access date, the owner of the data and the amount of disk space available.

We call this type of data movement with its single file system view, transpar-ent data mobility (TDM). The “Complementary Technologies” sidebar pres-ents the HDS technologies that contribute to TDM.

Next StepsTo learn more about how Hitachi NAS Platform and Hitachi technologies can sup-port your life sciences workflow, contact your Hitachi Data Systems representative.

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COMPLEMENTARY TECHNOLOGY FOR TRANSPARENT DATA MObILITY

To complement Hitachi hardware, we offer a number of technologies that help reduce storage management costs, optimize storage resource use and automatically move data to an appropriate storage tier. These technologies include:

■■ Data migrator feature, a policy-based engine, allows administrators to implement data movement policies.

■■ Cross volume links reside on the primary file system and point to the corresponding file on the secondary system, which houses the migrated data file.

■■ Dynamic read caching feature reserves space on a storage tier for caching of “hot” files. Dynamic read caching can be applied to a cluster of Hitachi networked storage servers. It is policy-driven and automated.

■■ Enterprise virtual server migration feature relocates a virtual server within a cluster or to a server outside of the cluster that share access to the same storage devices.

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Life Sciences Solutions

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Notice: This document is for informational purposes only, and does not set forth any warranty, expressed or implied, concerning any equipment or service offered or to be offered by Hitachi Data Systems Corporation.

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