Case Study: Life Sciences Company achieves 10x HPC performance and 50% lower storage costs to accelerate time-to-market for genomic analysis systems with NetApp

Life Sciences Company Accelerates Time to Market for Genomic Analysis Systems

A life sciences company that builds genomic analysis systems needed a virtualized, agile environment for business‑critical applications (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Exchange) and faster time to market for high‑performance computing (HPC). Its EMC Isilon–based HPC storage was hitting capacity and performance limits—slow compilations, millions of small files, ad‑hoc miniclusters, and prohibitively high cost per terabyte—forcing the IT team to find a more cost‑effective, scalable solution.

The company moved HPC storage to NetApp FAS8040/FAS3250 running clustered Data ONTAP, consolidated enterprise apps and databases on NetApp and VMware, and added Flash Cache, deduplication, Snapshot/SnapRestore and FlexClone technologies. The result: zero unplanned downtime, a tenfold increase in HPC performance, a 50% reduction in HPC storage costs, improved manageability and resiliency for enterprise apps, and budget freed to add compute and engineering resources to accelerate product development.