On September 17, 2019, WekaIO announced that Aiden Lab at Baylor College of Medicine selected the WekaFSTM file system to accelerate progress in genomics research.  Liran Zvibel, CEO and Co-Founder of WekaIO, shares his perspective on the reasons why this was a smart choice for Aiden Lab and on the unique value that WekaIO provides to any genomics research effort.

All of us at WekaIO are delighted that Aiden Lab at Baylor College of Medicine chose us to power its genomics research and to accelerate progress to new discoveries.  We appreciate every customer win, especially when it involves efforts that have the potential to improve health care and quality of life.  Our success depends on providing value, meeting the needs of our customers, and making them happy.

We are especially encouraged when we examine the reasons why Aiden Lab chose WekaIO.  Aiden Lab is a leading genome research facility and is part of The Center for Genome Architecture at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. The Center explores all aspects of genome structure – from the 1D sequence of the bases to the 3D folding that enables them to fit inside the nucleus of a cell.  Such research is both compute and data-intensive and puts extreme performance demands on file systems and I/O operations.  High-performance shared file storage is essential to meeting these demands to transform vast amounts of research data into insights. WekaFS is the first flash-native parallel file system and is ideal for the mixed storage workloads in Life Sciences, whether large or small files with random or sequential access patterns.

Aiden Lab needed a solution that would not only improve its application performance but also offer the ability to deploy a high-performance file system in cloud computing environments to accelerate its genomics research.  After extensive comparisons of high-speed shared file systems that included Lustre and GPFS, Aiden Lab selected the WekaFS, as none of the competitive offerings could match the performance that it could deliver on the AWS Cloud.  After installing WekaFS in the cloud, Aiden Lab experienced a 3x improvement in application performance – over the previous on-premises solution!  They also benefitted from the on-demand capacity and resource allocation planning of the cloud environment for their demanding workflows. From strictly a performance point of view, it is mind-boggling to realize that if WekaFS had been installed on-premises, the improvement would have been even more impressive!

Our success with Aiden Lab demonstrates just how fast WekaFS is; in fact, it is the fastest, most scalable parallel file system for data-intensive workloads. Our ability to work seamlessly with the AWS cloud provides an added layer of flexibility to accommodate varying and spiking compute and storage needs.  As such, the wonderful results from Aiden Lab’s selection of WekaFS are an indication of our ability to deliver extreme performance, flexibility, and agility across the board for all genomics and life sciences environments.

For more details about the announcement on Aiden Lab’s decision to choose WekaIO to power and accelerate genomics research, please click here.

Liran Zvibel, CEO of WekaIO, on Twitter: @liranzvibel