Brocade to handle genome facility's big data

Driven by the growth of genomic data sets, the Australian Genome Research Facility (AGRF) 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.

A national not-for-profit organisation, the AGRF is the country’s largest provider of genomics services, with laboratories in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. The facility utilises 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 10GbE 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, Thomas said AGRF looked for a solution that could deliver low-latency 10GbE 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.

Brocade partner Mycom proposed a solution based around the Brocade ICX 6610 Switch, which is designed to deliver chassis-like switch capabilities in a stackable form factor. Mycom was able to demonstrate its solution on-site and run a proof-of-concept project to show that a Brocade ICX 6610 switch stack could meet all of AGRF’s performance and latency requirements while being simple to operate.

“Compared to offerings from the other major switch vendors, the Brocade ICX 6610 switches deliver similar performance, but with an outstanding return on investment,” said Thomas. “Basically, we get three switches for the price of one, with two stacked to give us a fully redundant high-performance network core in the server room and the third deployed to handle outside traffic.

“The solution is very much plug-and-play so it was really easy to set up and, since deployment, we’ve doubled the amount of data running across the network without a problem. There’s capacity to spare in the stack, which we can activate through a software licence, enabling us to accommodate more servers over the next 12 months or so. If and when we need more scale, it is a simple matter of adding another switch to the stack.”

Each product has four dedicated 40GbE stacking ports that enable up to eight switches to be linked into a single logical device, managed through a single IP address, with 320 Gbps of total backplane stacking bandwidth. Each switch has up to eight 10GbE fibre ports and 48 1GbE ports. In a stacked configuration, traffic forwarding is transparent across the pool of ports, all of which deliver wire-speed, non-blocking performance.

“They’re easy to deploy, easy to manage and easy to integrate into both new and existing networks,” said Adam Judd, Brocade vice president for Asia Pacific. “With capacity upgrades though software licences and the ability to scale by adding to a stack, this is very much a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ solution that enables the AGRF to easily cope with its big data growth.”