Case Study: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology achieves low‑latency, high‑performance 10GbE with 5× NFS throughput and one‑quarter per‑port cost with Arista Networks

Laboratory of Molecular Biology deploys Arista 10GbE

The Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge — a world-class research centre supporting 20 research groups — faced a growing IT challenge as advances in imaging and sequencing increased data volumes and CPU demand. Their existing 120‑core cluster and Gigabit Ethernet network became a bottleneck as they planned two major cluster upgrades (336 and 450 cores), so the IT team needed a higher‑performance, low‑latency core switching solution that wouldn’t break the budget or limit campus interoperability.

LMB tested and deployed Arista 7100 10GbE switches in an active, high‑availability configuration to connect all clusters, NFS file servers and uplinks to the campus core. The result was a quarter‑of‑the‑price cost per port versus competitors, 100% uptime over 16 months, a five‑fold improvement in single‑threaded NFS performance, better load balancing and clear capacity to grow — enabling faster analyses and a scalable foundation for future 10Gb deployments.

MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Jake Grimmett

Head Of Scientific Computing, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology