ADTRAN Puts Data in Perspective with HudsonAlpha

How much data do you use in a day? It’s a good bet it’s not nearly as much as the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. The facility racks up to 100TB  of data per week doing its main business of DNA sequencing. During a dinner held at the facility’s Jackson Conference Center, ADTRAN Connect 2010 attendees were treated to HudsonAlpha’s perspective on data, networking and innovation — which also served as a wake-up call for any sleepy storage VARs who haven’t gotten the message yet …

Following dinner, HudsonAlpha was kind enough to show attendees around its lab and discuss how the research center uses ADTRAN technology (no surprise here). ADTRAN’s multigigabit networking solutions help funnel terabytes of data for analyzing and computation quickly enough to prevent bottlenecking to the massive supercomputers that do gene research and DNA sequencing. (To put it all in perspective, the human genome is about 8GB.)

Interesting enough. But what if you’re constantly fast-tracking, sequencing and decoding more than just a single human? Take the H1N1 virus, for example. Such an undertaking requires gargantuan effort done with the utmost care and sensitivity, especially since these are monetarily-heavy experiments. HudsonAlpha claims to chew through 100TB a week, resulting in more than 5,000PB (that stands for petabytes, folks) a year. And because there’s a constant torrent of data from these machines, there’s also a high failure rate on the drives storing the data — HudsonAlpha loses about one drive every eight days.

What’s more, HudsonAlpha’s computer systems perform lengthy tests nightly, which means failure due to power blips or inclement weather just can’t happen. The facility has four levels of UPS backup, starting with an uptime agreement with the power company and ending with individual UPSes attached to key machines.

So here’s a huge opportunity for VARs and resellers in the data storage and power backup/failover space — the biomedical field. Data is indispensable, and making sure those drives stay spinning is, too.

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