Case Study: Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center achieves cost-effective scalable cloud storage with SwiftStack

SwiftStack Enables Cost Effective Cloud Storage in Medical Research HPC Facility

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, a major medical research center focused on cancer and HIV research, needed a far more cost-effective way to manage rapidly growing scientific data across a large campus. With aging storage silos, rising chargebacks, and a need to retain research data for decades, they turned to SwiftStack for a scalable private cloud storage platform.

SwiftStack deployed a campus-wide object storage cloud built on commodity server nodes, giving Fred Hutch a single namespace for research data, HPC feeds, AWS connectivity, and backup storage. The result was a dramatic reduction in storage costs to 21% of legacy NAS and 48% less than public cloud, a 90% drop in chargebacks, and improved throughput of 600 MB/s versus 200 MB/s with NAS.

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Dirk Petersen

Director of Scientific Computing