University of Leipzig accelerates medical research with IBM. Advanced storage from IBM improved the research capabilities of the University of Leipzig. IBM's smarter approach to storage - http://ibm.co/WivIFU.

1. IBM Systems and Technology
Case Study
University of Leipzig
accelerates medical
research with IBM
Advanced storage from IBM for improved research
capabilities
The Institute for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology
The need (IMISE) at the University of Leipzig employs approximately 80 people
To provide better services to researchers, and is one of the region’s leading research institutes in the fields of medical
the Institute for Medical Informatics,
informatics, clinical studies and trials, biometric modeling and bioinfor-
Statistics and Epidemiology at the
University of Leipzig needed to boost the matics. The interdisciplinary institute ranks among the most successful in
utilization and performance of its storage. Germany, serving more than 10,000 academics.
The solution
To keep its leading position in medical research and to stay attractive to
Working with IBM, the institute imple-
mented an IBM Storwize® V7000 system, top scientists and industrial partners, the institute needed to refresh and
managing data used by IBM System x® expand its IT infrastructure. Growing demands in medical research com-
and IBM BladeCenter® servers that run bined with rapid increases in the total volume of data created the need for
research and administration workloads.
additional storage capacity, performance and ease of management.
The benefit
Accelerated data loading processes by Selecting IBM Storwize V7000
more than 60 percent, reduced physical The institute needed to take the next step and expand its storage systems
footprint for storage by 25 percent,
and increased storage efficiency by to meet new research requirements. With constantly growing data
66 percent. volumes, the institute looked for a fast, flexible and scalable storage solu-
tion. After evaluating various alternatives, the team at IMISE selected the
highly scalable and user-friendly IBM Storwize V7000 storage system.
“The IBM Storwize V7000 solution offered the best price-performance
ratio, combined with innovative storage virtualization and management
features,” says René Meinhold, System Administrator at IMISE at the
University of Leipzig. “These qualities were exactly what the institute was
looking for to support ongoing research projects.”

2. IBM Systems and Technology
Case Study
The IBM solution is also helping the institute to manage the growing
amounts of data generated by the Leipzig Interdisciplinary Research
“The new IBM solution Cluster of Genetic Factors, Clinical Phenotypes and Environment
enables us to engage in (LIFE)—a huge medical study with more than 25,000 participants.
ever more challenging
Moving to virtualized storage
research projects, and our Working with IBM to deploy the IBM Storwize V7000 system, the insti-
team to make strong tute increased its total data storage capacity from 26 TB to approximately
100 TB. Taking advantage of the built-in storage virtualization features of
contributions to the IBM solution, the team also connected its existing IBM System
important research Storage DS3400 disk systems to the Storwize V7000 environment.
projects.”
The shared fibre channel SAN architecture is now used for storage
by more than 35 IBM servers at the institute, including IBM System
—Peter Ahnert, Study Coordinator, Institute for
Medical Informatics, Statistics and
x3850 X5, IBM System x3650, as well as a number of IBM BladeCenter
Epidemiology at the University of Leipzig servers in four IBM BladeCenter chassis. The institute relies on these
servers for infrastructure services such as file servers, email systems, and
print servers, and also for complex research workloads. Depending on the
workloads, the servers run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Microsoft
Windows Server operating systems.
To ensure high availability for these vital IT services, the institute
operates five VMware vSphere Enterprise environments, complete with
VMware vCenter and VMware vSphere vMotion to enable live migration
of running systems.
To offer its team the optimal environment for achieving new research
insights, the institute wanted to exploit the full capacity of the new
storage solution and benefit from the substantially increased I/O
performance. This was achieved by installing a brand new IBM System
x3850 X5 server, built on the latest generation of IBM Enterprise
X-Architecture®, providing superior performance and reliability within
an energy-efficient design. The server is configured with 800 GB main
memory to process complex requests involving huge databases with
billions of records in-memory, enabling the institution to undertake
extensive research projects that it could not otherwise handle.
“The new storage and computing solution from IBM provides greatly
increased I/O capacity, speeding up many large database workloads,”
says Meinhold. “Additionally, the advanced IBM Storwize V7000 solution
2

3. IBM Systems and Technology
Case Study
provides a single user interface, enabling us to manage our different
Solution components storage resources more efficiently than before. The smooth interplay of
IBM and VMware solutions gives us all the flexibility we need to provide
Hardware reliable IT services to researchers at the institute.”
●●
IBM Storwize® V7000
●●
IBM System x® 3850 X5
●●
IBM System x3650 Improved performance enables new insights
●●
IBM BladeCenter® HS22 With its new storage and server systems, IMISE has the ability to work
Software on more complex and extensive research projects.
●●
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
●●
Microsoft Windows Enterprise Server With the dynamic migration capabilities of the Storwize V7000, data
●●
VMware vSphere Enterprise loading processes that had previously taken two months or longer have
been reduced by more than 60 percent, reducing delays for researchers.
In addition, while the physical footprint of the solution was reduced by
25 percent, the new systems provide superior performance and signifi-
cantly more storage capacity.
The use of thin-provisioning technology built into the Storwize V7000
solution has boosted storage efficiency substantially, leading to storage
space savings of 66 percent compared with the previous storage systems.
“As an institute at the University of Leipzig, we want to maintain our
leading position in medical research. The new IBM solution enables us to
engage in ever more challenging research projects, and our team to make
strong contributions to important research projects. With this technology,
we can process more data and gain insights that would not have been
possible with the legacy system,” says Peter Ahnert, Study Coordinator at
IMISE at the University of Leipzig.
With constantly growing data volumes, the institute already plans to
extend the current storage systems with an IBM Scale Out Network
Attached Storage—the most advanced architecture and flexible clustered
scale-out solution—when the LIFE project advances into the next stage
in one year’s time.
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner,
or visit us at: ibm.com/systems/storage
For more information about Institute for Medical Informatics,
Statistics and Epidemiology (IMISE) at University of Leipzig,
visit: www.imise.uni-leipzig.de/en/
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4. © Copyright IBM Corporation 2012
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Produced in the United States of America
March 2012
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