CASE STUDY
T
he Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial
Bioinformatics (CLIMB) is a
collaboration between Warwick,
Birmingham, Cardiff, Swansea, Bath and
Leicester Universities and The Quadram
Institute Bioscience. The idea behind CLIMB
was to bring bioinformatics capability
(computing power, storage and analysis
tools) to microbiologists working in UK
academia. With improvements in next-
generation sequencing technologies,
generating genomic datasets has become
easier. Many academics don’t have access to
the resources that they need to perform the
required bioinformatics analysis. CLIMB will
provide this resource. It will also be a place
for researchers to share scripts and pipelines
and produce new medical breakthroughs.
sites and groups. CLIMB’s goal was to use
software-based solutions and commodity
hardware to simplify collaboration.
“Genomic sequencing, for example, requires
huge amounts of computing power,” said
Dr Thomas Connor, Co-investigator for
CLIMB. “However, most microbiologists are
not computer experts. CLIMB provides a
platform for IT resource access to help them
easily work and collaborate more quickly.
“Different universities running different
systems made it very difficult to share
data,” said Connor. “Collaboration was
too challenging for our IT infrastructure.
We know that being able to easily share
resources is a great way of getting people to
work together.”
The challenge
The solution
The project needed a scalable, easily
accessible cloud platform to enable it to
share large amounts of genome sequence
data and project datasets between university
64
INTELLIGENTCIO
The project chose to deploy RDO OpenStack
as a scalable, easily accessible cloud platform
and Red Hat Ceph Storage to provide
scalable object storage. With this solution,
CLIMB can share a large amount of genome
sequence data and project datasets between
university sites and groups.
The benefits
The new solution, based on RDO OpenStack
and Red Hat Ceph Storage, helps customers
efficiently manage exponential data growth.
Red Hat Ceph Storage provides CLIMB with
object storage that is capable of meeting
the large-scale storage requirements needed
to help support medical breakthroughs.
Designed for the cloud, Red Hat Ceph
Storage can lower the cost of storing
enterprise data. It does not require
additional hardware investment and is
flexible and scalable. This immediately
helped CLIMB to manage its data growth
efficiently and automatically.
“Red Hat Ceph Storage provides object
storage and block storage with incredibly
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