Case Study: Weill Cornell Medical College achieves scalable, petabyte-grade storage for genomics and epigenomics research with DataDirect Networks (DDN)

Weill Cornell Medical College - Customer Case Study

The Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, a leader in genomics, epigenomics and personalized medicine, faced rapidly growing data from sequencing and imaging cores that overwhelmed its legacy patchwork of RAID silos. With terabytes ingested weekly and researchers slowed by long provisioning times, the institute needed a single, cost‑effective, centralized storage infrastructure that could support data ingest, processing, access and archiving for multiple departments and workflows.

They deployed DataDirect Networks’ Storage Fusion Architecture with GRIDScaler parallel file system in a pay‑as‑you‑grow “storage condo” model, starting with two SFA10K controllers and expandable trays, and added Ocarina content‑aware optimization to cut capacity needs by more than 50%. The result is a highly available, petabyte‑scale shared storage platform that delivers near‑local performance, much faster provisioning (hours to populate a petabyte, console commands to add capacity), improved reliability and the ability to support mixed workloads and multi‑site replication for years to come.

Weill Cornell Medical College

Jason Banfelder

Assistant Professor of Engineering Biophysics