Australian Genome Research Facility Selects Brocade to Handle Big Data Growth

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA--(Marketwired - Jul 23, 2014) - Driven by the unrelenting growth of genomic data sets, the Australian Genome Research Facility is deploying a high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) core network across its entire estate, with its Melbourne node the first to go live with new switching infrastructure from Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD).

A national not-for-profit organization, the Australian Genome Research Facility (AGRF) is the country's largest provider of genomics services, with laboratories in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth -- each providing a gateway to a national network of state-of-the-art facilities, technology and expertise. The AGRF utilizes cutting-edge technology to provide contract genomics services to academic, applied research and commercial markets spanning biomedicine, plant and animal science, microbiology, evolutionary biology and biodiversity.

One of the issues faced by AGRF and the genomic research community at large is coping with Big Data, with the latest generation of gene sequencing technology generating data files of over a terabyte every week off each of its five systems in operation. At the AGRF's Melbourne node the IT infrastructure has been upgraded to deliver the compute power, storage capacity and network performance to handle the growing data challenge.

"Universities and research institutes are now constantly moving around anything from 100 to 700 gigabytes of data, and the previous network was a real bottleneck for clients," said AGRF senior systems engineer Gismon Thomas. "We're introducing new IT capabilities, including 80 terabytes of storage with 10 GbE connectivity to handle the exponential growth of data archiving. We are also now testing a bioinformatics cloud infrastructure environment based around a set of blade servers that will go into production in the near future. A more capable network infrastructure was absolutely essential to fully enable these new systems."

To replace its legacy network switches, Gismon said AGRF went to market for a solution that could deliver low-latency 10 GbE performance at wire-speed, with a simplified network architecture and streamlined network management. He said the focus was on a cost-effective single-vendor solution that could handle three years of projected network traffic growth, to be rolled out across all AGRF sites.