From the discovery of DNA over a century ago to the sequencing of the entire human genome, the study of genomic research has come a long way
Due to recent advances in technology, researchers now have the capability to sequence a genome faster and more cost-effectively than ever before. And the information they gather from understanding a person’s unique genetic profile can be used to find and administer better medical treatments that can save lives.
One of the leaders in genomic research is HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. The computational work done at HudsonAlpha is data-intensive – and constantly growing. HudsonAlpha generates more than 6 petabytes of data a year that must be managed, stored, manipulated, and analyzed. To continue to advance in their research goals, they needed to digitally transform, which meant rethinking how they implement IT across their organization.
Strengthen on-premises infrastructure and embrace multi-cloud
The first step in HudsonAlpha’s digital transformation was to deploy a private cloud on premises, which would serve as the IT foundation of all their research projects. They implemented hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) because it provided a cost-effective and easy-to-use infrastructure that removed many of their production bottlenecks. They also selected composable infrastructure because it gave them more power, agility, and ease of use.
“We can now quickly adjust our compute, storage, and fabric resources to meet rapidly changing needs — reducing re-provisioning time from four days to less than two hours,” revealed Peyton McNully CIO at HudsonAlpha. “We’ve also increased storage capacity and lowered their costs.”
HudsonAlpha’s digital transformation doesn’t stop at their datacenter walls — it also includes public clouds. As part of HudsonAlpha’s nonprofit research mission, they are encouraging more and more researchers to collaborate with them and use their IT infrastructure. Many of these researchers have been given government grant money to test novel, new treatment theories. Because of these grants, researchers can quickly test creative ideas in a public cloud without taking resources away from the more accepted research methodologies in use on HudsonAlpha’s private cloud.
More researchers means more complexity
“We are excited about the new research we are able to conduct due to the government grants. Recent awards include research in biofuels, novel antibiotics, personalized medicine, and immunotherapy,” explained Katreena Mullican, Senior Architect at HudsonAlpha. “Yet life in the era of hybrid IT is not quite as simple as it sounds. Our collaboration with researchers worldwide creates a complex and ever-growing hybrid IT environment that needs to be managed.”
HudsonAlpha’s relatively small IT department needs a better way to proactively support the increased demands of such a large number of additional researchers accessing their infrastructure via multi-cloud environments. Researchers must be able to not only share data across public cloud, private cloud and on-premises IT, they need to be able to seamlessly move applications from one IT model to another.
“This surge of new researchers pursuing groundbreaking discoveries is a great opportunity. But it also means that HudsonAlpha must invest more time, money, and experts to ensure everything works together seamlessly,” continued Mullican. “Tracking, managing, and analyzing data in a multi-cloud environment is challenging to say the least.”
Enter HPE OneSphere, a multi-cloud management solution
In the fall of 2017, HudsonAlpha began working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to overcome this challenge. They implemented an innovative technology called HPE OneSphere, a newly announced multi-cloud management solution that lets customers deploy, operate, and optimize public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises environments through a simple and unified experience.
By streamlining management of hybrid IT resources, HPE OneSphere enables users to dynamically adjust workloads, easily transfer data, and rapidly develop apps. Users also benefit from a self-service design and unified experience, which minimizes the internal operations an enterprise needs to employ.
From a business perspective, HPE OneSphere provides better flexibility, higher productivity, and stronger control of utilization and spend across clouds — all while giving a user their tools of choice: clouds, containers, VMs, and bare metal.
Take control of hybrid IT
And that’s where HPE OneSphere has provided HudsonAlpha with significant improvements. Using this new cloud management and analytics platform, researchers can use unified workspaces to rapidly access needed services from private or public clouds. And more importantly, HudsonAlpha can track and analyze usage of these workloads wherever they are located — on or off premises in whatever cloud they are using around the world.
“Through the HPE OneSphere analytics dashboard, we can now get a very clear view on how infrastructure is being used across our entire hybrid estate,” McNully explained. “With this improved insight, we can allocate resources more effectively.”
For HudsonAlpha, HPE OneSphere is an essential solution to a growing challenge: how to manage and gain control of the escalating complexity of constantly expanding hybrid IT environments.
“HudsonAlpha is excited to be working with HPE to test drive this breakthrough multi-cloud management solution,” concluded McNully. “As a growing number of researchers use our infrastructure to collaborate more effectively, we will be better able to find answers to our most troubling health and science questions.”
HPE OneSphere is playing an important part in facilitating the collaborative research at HudsonAlpha. With better access to important data and applications across a multi-cloud environment, researchers can complete projects faster. And HudsonAlpha is able to take better control of an extremely complex hybrid IT environment, which saves them time and money.
HudsonAlpha’s Katreena Mullican talks about her experience with HPE OneSphere below.
Digital transformation: Simplifying the complex for better collaboration
HudsonAlpha is just one example of how enterprises are digitally transforming to better succeed in today’s complicated hybrid IT world. As enterprises worldwide seek to move faster, increase productivity and control costs, they are embracing a variety of technologies in a multi-cloud environment. While a myriad of options such as clouds, containers, VMs, and bare metal provide flexibility and choice, they also deliver complexity. HPE OneSphere provides the flexibility, choice, and control an enterprise needs to stay a step ahead of the competition.
About Chris Purcell
Chris Purcell drives analyst relations for the Software-Defined and Cloud Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The Software-Defined and Cloud Group organization is responsible for marketing for composable infrastructure, HPE OneView, HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged solutions and Project New Hybrid IT Stack. HPE has assembled an array of resources that are helping businesses succeed in a hybrid IT world. Learn about HPE’s approach to managing hybrid IT by checking out the HPE website, HPE OneSphere. And to find out how HPE can help you determine a workload placement strategy that meets your service level agreements, visit HPE Pointnext. HudsonAlpha has established an open source user community for sharing lessons learned with Synergy Image Streamer and Hybrid IT at: https://hudsonalpha.github.io/synergy/
