OSNEXUS: Hyperscale Storage Solutions for Life Sciences

Steven Umbehocker, Founder & CEO

The healthcare industry and fields such as pharmaceutical manufacturers, biotech firms, and health insurance companies are deploying new processes and technologies while keeping up with government regulations that require increasing amounts of data storage, causing the life sciences sector to generate some of the greatest amounts of data of any industry today. Genomics organizations, for example, are producing 40 exabytes of data per year. Coping with the need for fast storage with concurrent write streams surrounding Big Data at scale, OSNEXUS offers QuantaStor SDS, a unified Software Defined Storage (SDS) platform designed to scale up and out to make storage management easy while reducing overall enterprise storage costs. Deployed worldwide by Fortune 500 companies, “QuantaStor SDS addresses a broad set of storage use cases including server virtualization, big data, cloud computing, and high-performance applications to scale up and out physical and virtual storage appliances,” explains Steven Umbehocker, Founder and CEO of OSNEXUS.

As pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations set out to leverage big data analytics, QuantaStor SDS meets any storage workflow from accessing, collaborating, and managing structured and unstructured scientific data to backup and migration strategies, object storage, genome-based file access, encryption, and compliance. QuantaStor SDS’ hyperscale grid technology enables the scaling of storage up to 64 physical or virtual storage appliances and 64PB locally or dispersed across geographies from a single web-based user management interface with no special client-side software to install.

QuantaStor allows IT managers to distribute file, block or object storage in a way that achieves the best performance and capacity utilization per system

QuantaStor SDS also allows IT generalists to take advantage of the complex open source file, block, and object SDS technologies with only a few mouse clicks. It adds support for scale-out object storage via the S3 and SWIFT compatible REST-based protocols and integrates Ceph-storage technology to deliver scale-out block storage (iSCSI, Ceph RBD) and GlusterFS technology for scale-out NAS and file storage. Features include security—“One-click” full drive encryption with AES-256 and “on-the-wire” encryption via SMB3, IPSec, and HTTPS; high availability— ensuring business continuity in the event of a system failure such as a power outage, appliance hardware failure, software crash, or human error; and replication for moving data across multiple sites for disaster recovery.

QuantaStor SDS’ grid technology is designed uniquely with advanced grid scale-out management technology to enable the deployment of multiple appliances that can be managed from any location as a single unit, to keep up with massive data growth and simplify storage processes for life sciences professionals. QuantaStor Global Namespace simplifies NAS storage management and increases end-user productivity by combining shares into easy-to-access groups that are accessible across a grid of appliances. “This allows IT managers to distribute files in a way that achieves the best performance and capacity utilization per system,” explains Umbehocker. The QuantaStor SDS Data Migration Edition simplifies and speeds up the process, allowing life sciences companies to easily migrate multiple terabytes of storage using mobile hardware and a custom licensed edition of QuantaStor SDS. The QuantaStor SDS Cloud License Service enables customer self-provisioning of license keys simplifying the on-demand provisioning process.

OSNEXUS continuously innovates on product quality and industry-leading support to ensure customer and partner success with every deployment. Talking about the future, “OSNEXUS is integrating data analytics into its SDS grid architecture, which will help life sciences organizations make better use of their storage and simplify capacity planning,” concludes Umbehocker.