Case Study: Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute achieves scalable, resilient, low-latency web delivery with Riverbed ADC

Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute support data intensive research applications with Riverbed

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is a world-leading genomics research centre that publishes data across 320 websites and sees around 80 million hits per month. Its bespoke, data‑intensive applications produced large traffic spikes that overwhelmed an aging load‑balancer and limited the platform to about 400 simultaneous requests, causing frequent downtime and slow, inflexible configuration changes.

The Institute deployed Riverbed application delivery controllers (ADC) as virtual appliances to add resilience, control and scalability. Two ADCs replaced two switches and six physical servers, now managing 70 web and 20 database servers, reducing latency, cutting space and energy costs, enabling rapid configuration and site provisioning, and ensuring constant availability even during peak demand.

Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

Paul Bevan

Core Software Services Team Leader