Case Study: Children’s Mercy Kansas City achieves rapid pediatric genomic diagnosis and treatment with DataDirect Networks

Children’s Mercy Kansas City - Customer Case Study

Children’s Mercy Kansas City’s Center for Pediatric Genomic Medicine is a national leader in rapid pediatric genome sequencing—home to the STAT-Seq test that previously decoded genomes in about two days. As sequencing volumes and complexity grew, informatics became the bottleneck: legacy scale‑out NAS couldn’t keep up with massive data ingest, parallel I/O and storage density needs, slowing time to diagnosis for critically ill children.

The Center deployed a DDN GS7K 1 PB scale‑out storage solution (with GRIDScaler and integration for the Edico DRAGEN accelerator) alongside its HPC cluster to remove storage and I/O bottlenecks. This cut STAT‑Seq alignment/analysis time by about 43% (from 2.5 to 1.75 hours), increased sequencer ingest, enabled DRAGEN to run from shared storage (eliminating local SSDs), and moved the team closer to its goal of a full genome report in under 26 hours—accelerating diagnoses, treatments and research.

Children’s Mercy Kansas City

Shane Corder

HPC Systems Engineer