European Bioinformatics Institute

What began in the 1980s as a modest task of abstracting information from scientific literature soon became a major database activity with direct electronic submissions of data and the need for highly skilled informatics staff. The task grew in scale with the start of genome projects and gained visibility as the data became relevant to commercial research.

Today scientists increasingly turn to AI, machine learning, and deep learning to solve bioscience problems and generate new products and solutions. The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) now supports millions of researchers in all areas of the life sciences, from biomedicine to bio-diversity and agri-food research. To accomplish this mission, the Institute manages three data centers and 120PB of raw storage capacity to handle 27 million web requests each day.

Because EBI stores data forever so scientists can always access what they need, robust file systems are necessary. To free up as much money as possible for research, cost-effectiveness is also required.

The Institute chose NetApp ONTAP® feature NetApp FlexGroup for its robustness and flexibility. The Institute needed a solution that didn’t have an inherent metadata limitation. To handle some of the Institute’s file systems that are massively metadata heavy, NetApp developed the new FlexGroup product.