Western Digitalhas announced that the Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Épinière (ICM Brain and Spine Institute), an international brain and spinal cord research centre, selected Western Digital to update its storage infrastructure with the extremely fast, efficient and flexible OpenFlex™ open composable platform.
Leveraging NVMe over Fabrics™ (NVMe-oF™), ICM has more extensive access to shared storage, which can be easily allocated to meet any researcher or department need.
ICM also now has quicker access to critical data and the ability to resize and reallocate storage volumes on demand, assisting in the fight against neurological disorders.
Scientists at ICM need to capture and analyze patient data from an array of clinical imaging tools and across different labs. Researchers have been hampered by an aging data storage infrastructure that could not keep pace with their needs.
The latest advanced microscopy instruments can generate up to two terabytes of data every hour, which is far more than each workstation’s local storage can accommodate. This has created long delays at each step in the analysis pipeline, where scientists had to wait on the storage infrastructure to continue their work.
ICM worked with its technology partner, 2CRSi, to identify a new storage innovation that could provide the perfect combination of performance and flexibility, selecting Western Digital’s OpenFlex Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure.
OpenFlex provides ICM with ultra-fast storage performance within a more efficient and flexible architecture, allowing scientists to continually push their work forward without having to wait for storage.
For ICM’s IT department, OpenFlex means no longer having to squeeze in local storage close to workstations, or manually move storage around campus as projects change. Instead, they can distribute storage capacity over ICM’s Ethernet network wherever and whenever it’s needed, without sacrificing performance.
Kurt Chan, vice president and general manager, Data Center Platforms at Western Digital said, “Today’s clinical workloads require fast, and highly reliable storage solutions to store massive amounts of research and patient data.
As the clarity and resolution of clinical imaging increases, more bioimages need to be centrally stored to accelerate evaluations and diagnostics. Our OpenFlex open composable solution provides easy access to these large bioimaging files in near real-time, helping to speed up time to discovery of critical cures and treatment options.”
“Our scientists don’t want to worry about storage technology or IT infrastructure, and with OpenFlex, they don’t have to,” said Caroline Vidal, CTO at ICM. “We can provide fast, low-latency access to imaging data, in up to four times the resolution than researchers could work with before. The shared storage with NVMe-oF is just there when they need it, so they can focus on using the data and advancing their research.”
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