# Genomics England Selects Weka to Accelerate Genomics Research for 5 Million Genomes Project **Published:** January 14, 2020 **Location:** CAMPBELL, Calif. ![WEKA logo with abstract white shapes on a textured purple to orange gradient background](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ult5g8gw/production/4061da3e03532447a685d4d60928329ecf6bfba7-1200x675.png) > Genomics England selects WekaFS to power its 5 Million Genomes Project, delivering 10x faster performance and scalable, secure storage for hundreds of petabytes of DNA data. _The institution benefits from implementing the world’s fastest file system to underpin genomics research at massive scale_ WekaIO™ (Weka), the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data-intensive applications, today announced that Genomics England (GEL) has selected the Weka File System (WekaFS™) to accelerate genomics research for the 5 Million Genomes Project. Genomics England chose WekaFS to meet the predicted capacity scaling that will be required over the coming five years while delivering the highest performance to its DNA pipeline. Genomics England is owned by the United Kingdom’s Department of Health and Social Care and tasked to run the 5 Million Genomes Project. This project aims to sequence 5 million genomes from National Health Service (NHS) patients with rare diseases, their families, and patients with common cancers. With the support of the public, Genomics England is creating a lasting legacy for patients. With an ambitious vision for genomic medicine in the NHS, including plans to sequence 5 million genomes over the next five years, Genomics England is setting the stage for new scientific discovery and significant medical insight. After an extensive evaluation process, Genomics England chose Weka as it was the only vendor that could meet the anticipated performance and capacity scaling requirements within the projected budget constraints. In addition, the institute needed a system that could deliver a complete enterprise feature set, with the highest levels of data security and public cloud integration.  WekaIO was the only vendor that met all of the stringent requirements of the RFP while also delivering the best cost economics. “The Genomics England cluster required a new solution to allow scaling of the company’s DNA data bank in line with the anticipated five-year growth.  Already at 25 petabytes, our legacy storage system had already reached its limit and performance had deteriorated,” said David Ardley, director of technology at Genomics England. “We needed a modern storage solution that could scale to 100s petabytes while maintaining performance scaling, and it had to be simple to manage at that scale. With its clever combination of flash for performance and object store for scale, Weka has proven to be a great solution.” “As an independent data services integrator, Nephos looked at the market to find the best fit for Genomics England’s requirement and Weka stood out head and shoulders above the rest for delivering a modern file system to better assist life sciences organizations,” said Michael Queenan, co-founder and director at Nephos Technologies, a Weka Innovation Network (WIN) Leader partner. “Genomics England is leading the charge on the research front by using our technology leadership to achieve a leap in application performance that is far beyond the capabilities of any legacy parallel file system. The Weka File System has delivered a 10x performance improvement over GEL’s legacy NFS-based NAS and is enabling more effective use of existing cloud infrastructure. The Weka File System will improve overall productivity and empower researchers to become more efficient at analyzing results,” said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and chief executive officer at WekaIO. WekaFS is a fully parallel and distributed file system that has been designed from scratch to leverage both high-performance flash technology and cost-effective disk storage. Data and metadata are both distributed across the entire storage infrastructure to ensure massively parallel access to NVMe drives. Data is seamlessly tiered from flash to disk with Weka’s internal tiering mechanism, achieving the optimum use of storage media for the best economics. To read the full Genomics England case study, go to: [http://bit.ly/36KB0nM](http://bit.ly/36KB0nM) For more information on the 5 Million Genomes Project, go to [https://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/about-genomics-england/](https://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/about-genomics-england/). To find a reseller in the WekaIO Innovation Network, a global partner program, go to [https://www.weka.io/partners/](/partners/) A modern file system that accelerates the data pipeline, whether it is next-generation sequencing, Microscopy or bio-imaging, lowers the cost of research, and keeps data secure: HPC for Life Sciences ## About WEKA **About WEKA** WEKA is the AI data and memory infrastructure company transforming the economics of agentic AI. Its NeuralMesh™ platform unifies high-performance data storage with extended GPU memory, giving enterprises, AI cloud providers, and AI builders a single foundation for training, inference, and agentic workloads. With Augmented Memory Grid, NeuralMesh extends GPU memory capacity by 1000x, accelerates time to first token by up to 20x, and delivers 10x more concurrent users from the same GPU footprint, proven in production benchmarks. Trusted by 30% of the Fortune 50, WEKA enables organizations to scale AI faster, optimize GPU utilization, and reduce the cost of every token served. Learn more at [www.weka.io](https://www.weka.io/) or connect with us on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/weka-io/) and [X](https://x.com/weka). _WEKA and the W logo are registered trademarks of WekaIO, Inc. Other trade names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners._ **Media Contact:** WEKA Communications [pr@weka.io](mailto:pr@weka.io) ## More Press Releases - [Backblaze and WEKA Simplify Data Management Across the AI Lifecycle](/news/backblaze-and-weka-simplify-data-management-across-the-ai-lifecycle) - [WEKA and Andromeda Partner to Power AI Workloads at Global Scale](/news/weka-and-andromeda-partner-to-power-ai-workloads-at-global-scale) - [WEKA Unveils WEKApod 3: The World's Densest AI Storage and Memory System for Agentic Workloads](/news/wekapod-3-densest-ai-storage-memory-system) - [WEKA Debuts NeuralMesh 6 to Power Enterprise and Agentic AI Workloads at Production Scale](/news/neuralmesh-6-enterprise-agentic-ai)