Case Study: Keck School of Medicine of USC achieves faster genomics research and scalable storage with DDN

Keck School of Medicine of USC - Customer Case Study

The Keck School of Medicine of USC’s Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute needed to support large-scale genomics research, but its legacy SAN storage had become a bottleneck. It could not keep up with the lab’s sequencing workloads, limited upload speeds, and growing capacity needs, slowing research on the genetic basis of behavior, cognition, and psychiatric disorders. DDN worked with USC to address the challenge using its GRIDScaler® file storage appliance.

DDN implemented a high-performance storage solution based on DDN Storage Fusion Architecture® and GRIDScaler parallel file system support, while also preserving NFS compatibility for existing infrastructure. The result was a scalable platform that doubled raw capacity to more than 1PB, delivered over 800 million IOPS, and allowed multiple BWA alignment workflows and the Illumina CASAVA pipeline to run while data was still being uploaded. USC reported that data transfer and processing now take about a third of the time, improving time to discovery.

Keck School of Medicine of USC

James Knowles

Keck School of Medicine USC