University of Leipzig accelerates medical research with IBM

The Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology (IMISE) at the University of Leipzig employs approximately 80 people and is one of the region's leading research institutes in the fields of medical informatics, clinical studies and trials, biometric modeling and bioinformatics. The interdisciplinary institute ranks among the most successful in Germany, serving more than 10,000 academics.

To keep its leading position in medical research and to stay attractive to top scientists and industrial partners, the institute needed to refresh and expand its IT infrastructure. Growing demands in medical research combined with rapid increases in the total volume of data created the need for additional storage capacity, performance and ease of management.

Selecting IBM Storwize V7000
The institute needed to take the next step and expand its storage systems to meet new research requirements. With constantly growing data volumes, the institute looked for a fast, flexible and scalable storage solution. After evaluating various alternatives, the team at IMISE selected the highly scalable and user-friendly IBM Storwize V7000 storage system.

"The IBM Storwize V7000 solution offered the best price-performance ratio, combined with innovative storage virtualization and management features," says René Meinhold, System Administrator at IMISE at the University of Leipzig. "These qualities were exactly what the institute was looking for to support ongoing research projects."

The IBM solution is also helping the institute to manage the growing amounts of data generated by the Leipzig Interdisciplinary Research Cluster of Genetic Factors, Clinical Phenotypes and Environment (LIFE)—a huge medical study with more than 25,000 participants.

Moving to virtualized storage
Working with IBM to deploy the IBM Storwize V7000 system, the institute increased its total data storage capacity from 26 TB to approximately 100 TB. Taking advantage of the built-in storage virtualization features of the IBM solution, the team also connected its existing IBM System Storage DS3400 disk systems to the Storwize V7000 environment.

The shared fibre channel SAN architecture is now used for storage by more than 35 IBM servers at the institute, including IBM System x3850 X5, IBM System x3650, as well as a number of IBM BladeCenter servers in four IBM BladeCenter chassis. The institute relies on these servers for infrastructure services such as file servers, email systems, and print servers, and also for complex research workloads. Depending on the workloads, the servers run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Microsoft Windows Server operating systems.

To ensure high availability for these vital IT services, the institute operates five VMware vSphere Enterprise environments, complete with VMware vCenter and VMware vSphere vMotion to enable live migration of running systems.

To offer its team the optimal environment for achieving new research insights, the institute wanted to exploit the full capacity of the new storage solution and benefit from the substantially increased I/O performance. This was achieved by installing a brand new IBM System x3850 X5 server, built on the latest generation of IBM Enterprise X-Architecture®, providing superior performance and reliability within an energy-efficient design. The server is configured with 800 GB main memory to process complex requests involving huge databases with billions of records in-memory, enabling the institution to undertake extensive research projects that it could not otherwise handle.

“The new storage and computing solution from IBM provides greatly increased I/O capacity, speeding up many large database workloads," says Meinhold. "Additionally, the advanced IBM Storwize V7000 solution provides a single user interface, enabling us to manage our different storage resources more efficiently than before. The smooth interplay of IBM and VMware solutions gives us all the flexibility we need to provide reliable IT services to researchers at the institute.”

Improved performance enables new insights
With its new storage and server systems, IMISE has the ability to work on more complex and extensive research projects.

With the dynamic migration capabilities of the Storwize V7000, data loading processes that had previously taken two months or longer have been reduced by more than 60 percent, reducing delays for researchers. In addition, although while the physical footprint of the solution was reduced by 25 percent, the new systems provide superior performance and significantly more storage capacity.

“As an institute at the University of Leipzig, we want to maintain our leading position in medical research. The new IBM solution enables us to engage in ever more challenging research projects, and our team to make strong contributions to important research projects. With this technology, we can process more data and gain insights that would not have been possible with the legacy system,” says Peter Ahnert, Study Coordinator at IMISE at the University of Leipzig.

With constantly growing data volumes, the institute already plans to extend the current storage systems with an IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage—the most advanced architecture and flexible clustered scale-out solution—when the LIFE project advances into the next stage in one year’s time.