Brocade switching infrastructure has supported the Australian Genome Research Facility in deploying 10 Gigabit Ethernet core network.
AGRF, which has laboratories in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, utilizes technology to provide contract genomics services to academic, applied research and commercial markets covering the biomedicine, plant and animal science, microbiology, evolutionary biology and biodiversity.
In order to manage growth of Big Data demands, AGRF’s Melbourne node upgraded the IT infrastructure to deliver the compute power, storage capacity and network performance. The latest generation of gene sequencing technology is generating data files of over a terabyte every week off each of its five systems in operation.
Brocade said universities and research institutes are now constantly moving around anything from 100 to 700 gigabytes of data.
AGRF senior systems engineer Gismon Thomas said: “We’re introducing new IT capabilities, including 80 terabytes of storage with 10 GbE connectivity to handle the 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.”
Utilizing Brocade ICX 6610 Switch, which delivers switch capabilities in a stackable form factor, AGRF can now accommodate more servers over the next 12 months.
Each Brocade ICX 6610 has four dedicated 40 GbE 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. Brocade said each switch has up to eight 10 GbE fiber ports and 48 1 GbE ports.
