Case Study: Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation achieves scalable, cost-effective storage with SwiftStack

Top research institution grows storage for IT and Science with SwiftStack

Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF), a nonprofit biomedical research institute, needed a better way to manage rapidly growing research and backup data without making large upfront storage purchases or committing to expensive hardware refresh cycles. The organization also wanted to reduce its reliance on costly tape backup and archive infrastructure, while keeping storage flexible enough for long-term scientific data retention.

SwiftStack provided a software-based, pay-as-you-grow storage solution that integrated with OMRF’s existing environment, including Commvault backup, and could run on commodity hardware. Deployment was quick—about 20 minutes for the Cloud Library—and expansion was as simple as adding disks. SwiftStack helped OMRF avoid vendor lock-in, reduce operational burden, and scale efficiently: the initial 250TB deployment reached 89% utilization (223TB) in about 90 days, with 150TB supporting Commvault backups, and OMRF also gained a path toward offsite disaster recovery.

Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation

Brent Keck

Chief Information Officer