Case Study: Institute of Plant Molecular Biology achieves scalable, resilient bioinformatics data management with DataCore Software

Empowering Bioinformatics Research and Data Handling at Scale for IBMP

IBMP (Institute of Plant Molecular Biology), the largest CNRS laboratory in Alsace, faced an exploding volume of bioinformatics data — roughly 80 TB produced per year from NGS and nanopore sequencing — and needed always-accessible, long‑term storage to retain research data for up to 15 years. Their existing RAID6 NAS and even a SANsymphony-backed VMware cluster could not scale or restore quickly enough, so IBMP evaluated options and selected DataCore, moving from SANsymphony block storage toward object storage.

DataCore implemented Swarm software‑defined object storage, deployed on a 10‑node Dell PowerEdge cluster (licensed for 850 TB usable out of 1.3 PB raw) with S3/HTTP access, erasure coding, AD integration and VMware ESXi. The DataCore Swarm solution delivered greater resilience and performance than traditional file systems, simplified administration and content access, enabled always‑on access for bioinformatics tools, and reduced power consumption via Darkive — solving IBMP’s scaling, accessibility and long‑term retention challenges.

Institute of Plant Molecular Biology

Jean-Luc Evrard

Director of the Information System