HudsonAlpha simplifies hybrid IT with HPE OneSphere

From the discovery of DNA over a century ago to the sequencing of the entire human genome, the study of genomic research has come a long way. Due to recent advances in technology, researchers now have the capability to sequence a genome faster and more cost-effectively than ever before. And the information they gather from understanding a person's unique genetic profile can be used to find and administer better medical treatments that can save lives.

One of the leaders in genomic research is HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. The computational work done at HudsonAlpha is data-intensive - and constantly growing. HudsonAlpha generates over 6 petabytes of data a year that must be managed, stored, manipulated, and analyzed. To continue to advance in their research goals, they needed to digitally transform, which meant rethinking how they implement IT across their organization.

Genomics research gets a boost from hybrid IT

The first step in HudsonAlpha's digital transformation was to deploy a private cloud on premises, which would serve as the IT foundation of all their research projects. They implemented hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) because it provided a cost-effective and easy to use infrastructure that removed many of their production bottlenecks. They also selected composable infrastructure because it gave them more power, agility, and ease of use. HudsonAlpha can now quickly adjust their compute, storage, and fabric resources to meet rapidly changing needs - reducing re-provisioning time from four days to less than two hours. They've also increased their storage capacity and lowered their costs.

HudsonAlpha's digital transformation doesn't stop at their datacenter walls - it also includes public clouds. Many of their researchers have been given government provided grant money to test novel, new treatment theories. Because of these grants, they can quickly test creative ideas in a public cloud without taking resources away from the more accepted research methodologies that use their private cloud.

The next step: better hybrid IT control and management

Life in the era of hybrid IT is not quite as simple as it sounds. With their applications and data spread out across public cloud, private cloud and on-premises IT, HudsonAlpha needs a way to better share information as well as seamlessly move applications from one IT model to another. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) is currently working with them to overcome this challenge.

Earlier this year in June, HPE announced Project New Hybrid IT Stack, a technology preview that showed how organizations could seamlessly compose, operate, and optimize all workloads across on-premises, private, hosted, and public clouds. With a personalized dashboard based on different personas, it provides built-in business analytics and controls that allows IT operators and application developers to simply click or code resources and services across their entire hybrid infrastructure.

HudsonAlpha is currently beta testing this innovative technology called HPE OneSphere. As part of HudsonAlpha's nonprofit research mission, they are encouraging more and more researchers to collaborate with them and use their IT infrastructure. This collaboration creates a complex and ever-growing hybrid IT environment, which must be maintained by a relatively small IT department.

HudsonAlpha seeks ways to become more flexible and agile in order to proactively support the new demands of many additional researchers accessing their infrastructure via multi-cloud environments. Tracking, managing, and analyzing public clouds along with their private cloud is challenging--to say the least. An explosion of new scientists pursuing groundbreaking discoveries is a great problem to have. But it also means that HudsonAlpha must invest more time, money, and experts to ensure everything works together seamlessly.

And that's where HPE OneSphere has provided significant improvements. Using this new multi-cloud management and analytics platform, HudsonAlpha researchers can use unified workspaces to rapidly access needed services from private or public clouds. And more importantly, they can track and analyze usage of these workloads wherever they are located -- on or off premises in whatever cloud they are using around the world.

Through the HPE OneSphere analytics dashboard, HudsonAlpha can now get a very clear view on how infrastructure is being used across their entire hybrid estate. With this improved insight, HudsonAlpha is able to best allocate resources for maximum impact to its mission (Research, Education, Genomic Medicine, and Economic Development).

For HudsonAlpha, HPE OneSphere is an essential solution to a growing challenge: how to manage and gain control of the escalating complexity of constantly expanding hybrid IT environments. I am excited to be working with HudsonAlpha and numerous other beta customers as they test drive this breakthrough new software.

Don't let infrastructure hold you back

Genetics and genomics research is helping medical professionals better control healthcare costs and meet patient needs. And researchers and clinicians are using genomic sequencing to help physicians diagnose and treat disease when certain genomic information is available. Digital transformation is key to accelerating genomic research and achieving that goal. Organizations like HudsonAlpha are effectively using hybrid IT solutions to move forward in their digital transformation. And HPE OneSphere is playing an important role in their successful management of hybrid IT.

HPE has assembled an array of resources that are helping businesses succeed in a hybrid IT world. Learn about HPEs approach to managing hybrid IT by checking out the HPE website,Project New Hybrid IT Stack. Read more about composable infrastructure through the e-book,Composable Infrastructure for Dummies. And to find out how HPE can help you determine a workload placement strategy that meets your service level agreements, visitHPE Pointnext. HudsonAlpha has established an open source user community for sharing lessons learned with Synergy Image Streamer and Hybrid IT at: https://hudsonalpha.github.io/synergy/