ACCELERATE: LIFE SCIENCES - Children’s Mercy Kansas City Reduces Time to Achieve Major Medical Breakthroughs for Critically Ill Children by Nearly 2x with Rapid Genome Sequencing Powered by High-Performance DDN Storage
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- DDN GS7K®
Tech Stack
- High-Performance Computing
- Genomic Sequencing
- Data Storage
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Innovation Output
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Condition Monitoring
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
Children’s Mercy Kansas City is a leading children’s hospital that operates the world’s first whole genome sequencing center in a pediatric setting. At the hospital’s Center for Pediatric Genomic Medicine, physicians collaborate with clinical laboratory scientists, molecular geneticists, bioinformaticians and software engineers to sequence and analyze rare inherited diseases. In 2012, Time magazine named the Center’s rapid genome mapping test, STAT-Seq, a top medical breakthrough of the year for decoding a genome from start to finish in about two days—a process that traditionally takes six weeks or longer. The Center is focused on developing clinical tests for next-generation medical treatments to improve outcomes for patients at Children’s Mercy and around the world.
The Challenge
Children’s Mercy Kansas City, a leading children’s hospital, operates the world’s first whole genome sequencing center in a pediatric setting. The hospital’s Center for Pediatric Genomic Medicine collaborates with various professionals to sequence and analyze rare inherited diseases. However, genetic sequencing is very compute- and data-intensive, which puts ever-increasing pressure on the Center’s IT team to deliver ample processing power and highly capable data storage to support testing based on both whole genome sequencing and whole exome sequencing. The Center had previously deployed EMC Isilon storage, which initially met their storage requirement for handling both clinical and research workflows. Over time, however, Children’s Mercy’s traditional scale-out NAS storage lacked the scalability in performance and capacity to address demanding data creation and access needs.
The Solution
Children’s Mercy deployed the DDN GS7K® with 1PB of scale-out storage to meet performance, parallel I/O and capacity requirements. DDN’s GRIDScaler® platform, which integrates the industry’s leading performance and density storage with IBM® Spectrum Scale™-based parallel file system, was ideal for supporting the Center’s full range of clinical and research workflows. DDN delivered the complete end to end data management of the high performance and collaboration environment seamlessly. DDN’s GS7K also provided Children’s Mercy with the ideal form factor, delivering high-density storage within its small data center footprint, and the ability to scale capacity in a simple fashion. The Center also is exploring opportunities to expand its DDN storage to reinforce its leadership in pediatric translational research.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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