Case Study: Genomics England achieves scalable high-performance genomic storage with Weka

Genomics England Improved Scale and Performance for On-Premises Cluster

Genomics England, the UK Department of Health and Social Care organization behind the 5 million genomes project, needed a storage platform that could scale to 140 petabytes while supporting highly randomized access for over 3,000 researchers. Its existing scale-out NAS system had reached scaling limits, slowed near capacity, and lacked a viable disaster recovery strategy for its growing genomic data set.

Genomics England chose Weka’s WekaFS software on industry-standard servers to create a single, hybrid storage architecture with NVMe flash and object storage. Weka delivered more than 10x performance improvement, cut storage cost per genome from £52 to £13, and enabled geo-distributed disaster recovery across three sites, with the potential to burst compute to public cloud as research needs grow.

Genomics England

David Ardley

Director of Infrastructure Transformation