Case Study: Public Health England achieves rapid, large-scale pathogen genome analysis with DataDirect Networks

Public Health England - Customer Case Study

Public Health England (PHE), the UK public health agency established in 2013, needed to scale its MS bioinformatics service to support routine whole‑genome sequencing of pathogens for national outbreak detection and surveillance. The existing workstation‑based setup could only handle about a dozen samples at a time, so PHE required a high‑performance, highly parallel storage and compute solution that could process hundreds of samples simultaneously, provide an active archive, and enable secure data sharing across sites.

PHE partnered with OCF and deployed DDN’s SFA10K EXAScaler with Lustre (300 TB) alongside DDN WOS object storage (360 TB) and iRODS for lifecycle and workflow management. The new platform lets the team process ~192–200 samples in parallel (turnarounds cut from days to hours), has supported more than 10,000 samples and 500,000 jobs to date, and provides an active archive and private‑cloud replication to accelerate collaboration, outbreak response and resistance monitoring.

Public Health England