Today, it was announced that Queen Mary University of London has chosen E8 Storage, to underpin its genomic workflow
and significantly increase performance. With the newly updated high-performance
cluster, supporting both researchers and students, the university will be able
to leverage the benefits of the industry's first shared NVMe storage solution
to optimize its data intensive workloads.
With a shared NVMe platform
in place, QMUL will be able to accelerate the performance of the fast-tier scratch
space behind a distributed file system to support genomic sequencing. The high
performance and capacity of E8 Storage NVMe-over-Fabrics system will be used
for both data and metadata, enabling QMUL to push more jobs through the cluster
at a faster rate.
"Performance and data
optimization are essential to the work behind genomic processing, and E8
Storage overcomes the traditional storage constraints with its first-to-market
shared NVMe storage platform," commented Tom King, Assistant Director for Research,
IT Services at Queen Mary University of London. "The team have been extremely
responsive right from the start, and we were able to discuss our main use case
and pain points to see how the technology would enable us to overcome this. In
addition, we were extremely pleased with the latest benchmark performance tests
which showed E8 Storage as a leader in NVMe."
The previous high-performance
system that the university used to support its genomics research was no longer
fast enough to support its needs. Upon seeing the new performance benchmarks
published by E8 Storage, the institution decided to upgrade, opting for the
E8-D24 array to support genomics and moving the existing storage to a bulk
storage tier. With E8 Storage, QMUL now has equipment that can scale for the
future and deliver the fastest performance speed in the industry.
"OCF are pleased to be
working with E8 Storage to provide the industry leading NVMe-over-Fabric
solution to QMUL. The combination of great performance figures and integration
with IBM Spectrum Scale make the E8 Storage appliance a great way for QMUL to
provide a high-performance scratch tier to their cutting-edge
researchers. OCF are proud to have been working with QMUL to expand their
cluster and provide cutting edge technologies and services to their world-class
researchers," said Mahesh Pancholi, business development manager at OCF.
QMUL is part of the Russell
Group and is ranked fifth in the UK in terms of research quality. Integral to
this ranking is its study of genomics, which requires high computing and
processing power. IT services has a fundamental role to play in supporting this
research, and with the need to cater to students and influential researchers,
the institution decided to research the market and with the support of its
channel partner, OCF, looked for the latest
cutting-edge technology with performance and optimization.
"The combination of Mellanox InfiniBand and E8
Storage provides the high computing and storage performance needed for QMUL's
research activities," said Gilad Shainer, Vice President of Marketing at
Mellanox. "Connecting the shared NVMe storage with high speed InfiniBand
network is an ideal design for genomic applications."