Case Study: Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute accelerates genomics research with scalable, high-performance storage from DataDirect Networks

Sanger Institute - Customer Case Study

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is a world-leading genomic research center tackling major global-health problems. Rapid advances in next-generation sequencing — including 30 Illumina sequencers producing roughly 1 TB/day each and a user community of over 2,000 scientists (with ~20 million website hits weekly) — created unpredictable “big data” growth and extreme compute demands (single cancer genomes can require up to 10,000 CPU hours). Sanger needed scalable, high-throughput storage that worked with its Lustre file system and iRODS while constrained by a 10GbE network and data‑center space limits.

Sanger deployed DataDirect Networks’ Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) with EXAScaler Lustre appliances and iRODS, validating SFA10K platforms in production. The solution delivered 22.5 PB of usable capacity, boosted throughput from 3 GB/s to ~20 GB/s, and supports tens of thousands of simultaneous sequencing analyses and large multi‑core clusters without forklift upgrades. As a result, storage ceased to be the bottleneck, enabling faster analysis, scalable data management, and easier global data sharing and collaboration.

Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

Tim Cutts

Acting Head of Scientific Computing, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute