IDG Contributor Network: 700,000 reasons to implement object storage in a research environment

As the director of scientific computing for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Dirk Petersen, and industry acquaintance of mine, needs his internal IT organization to store and catalogue large amounts of unstructured and genomic data, all of which is critical to his organization and its many constituents. A data loss caused by server or storage hardware failure would be problematic for his organization and its researchers at best, and catastrophic at worst.

Petersen’s IT team is given a limited budget each year to purchase and maintain its researchers’ storage systems, making it difficult to afford the inherent costs and overhead associated with the classic storage manufacturers. And not just hard costs. These storage platform purchases, in my opinion, can require significant up-front investment, hinder the ability to mix and match solutions along the way and force an organization’s IT team to conduct dreaded forklift upgrades that drain resources.

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