DataDirect Networks Storage App to Support Researchers Managing Large-Scale Bioinformatics Workloads; Aaron Gardner Comments

DataDirect Networks has been selected by the University of Florida to provide an integrated storage appliance to academic researchers for managing large-scale bioinformatics and life sciences workloads, Datanami reported Dec. 5.

Alex Woodie writes the University of Florida’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research wanted a converged infrastructure that is built to manage petabytes of data, as well as to reduce a system’s power consumption and physical space requirement.

DDN and ICBR worked together to integrate the open-source iRODS enterprise data management application into DDN’s Storage Fusion Architecture platform, according to the article.

“We said, what if we did the same thing and embedded into a virtual machine first general parallel file system, to define a single parallel storage namespace, and all the benefits it has, and then put iRODS on top of that, to do the metadata management, and embedded all that on the appliance?,” Aaron Gardner, ICBR cyberinfrastructure section director told the publication.

“The idea is we’re all trying to minimize latency so the closer we can get these services to the actual storage hardware, the better,” Gardner added.

DDN is the first private company to join the iRODS Consortium and is scheduled to release an update to its SFA platform in early 2014, according to the report.