WANdisco grants industry leading LiveData Platform to fast-track high-volume genome analysis and Covid-19 research in South Korea

SAN RAMON, Calif., March 17, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- WANdisco, the LiveData company, announced today that it donated its LiveData Platform to help Korea Research Institute of Bioscience & Biotechnology conduct faster analysis in its efforts towards Covid-19 research. Using the automated data migration and replication platform, the institute has been able to replicate files between Hadoop-based big data clusters and Linux-based analysis clusters 13 times faster than before, and reduce analysis time by over 30 percent.

In early 2020, WANdisco announced free access to their suite of cloud migration and big data tools for teams involved in research and developing potential treatments and cures for the Covid-19 pandemic. WANdisco provided its LiveData Platform along with technical resources to Korean Bioinformation Center (KOBIC) to assist the organization in enhancing its architecture, developing products, and introducing WANdisco's automated replication technology into KOBIC's workflow.

"Donating our LiveData platform to the Covid-19 research was absolutely the right thing to do," said David Richards, Chairman and CEO, WANdisco. "Every minute, new data is being generated about people suffering from Covid-19. Velocity has become more important than anything else in the development of vaccines and treatments to overcome infectious diseases. We were grateful for the opportunity to assist Korea accelerate its Covid-19 research and analysis."

KOBIC provides Bio-Express, a cloud service free to bio-engineering researchers at Korean hospitals, businesses, universities, and research institutes for large-capacity genome analysis and storage. Since March 2020, the platform's Covid-19 research information portal has provided Covid-19-related genomes and proteomic data from around the world. As the amount of data and users skyrocketed last year, so did the time to replicate terabytes of data between the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and the Linux/Unix based Lustre file system to support the analysis tools within different operating environments. More than 40 percent of Bio-Express's total processing time was solely dedicated to replicate an average of 20TB of data per day.

Upon hearing about Korea's data replication challenges, WANdisco donated its LiveData Platform to reduce large-scale data replication time while ensuring data availability and consistency to researchers. KOBIC administrators could easily and immediately move HDFS data to Bio-Express with automated migration and replication capabilities. No changes were required to applications, cluster or node configuration or operation while ensuring data changes were replicated completely and consistently.

With this new capacity, KOBIC expects to significantly increase the next generation of Bio-Express's efficiency to perform large-scale genome analysis in 2021. WANdisco has since provided KOBIC with an ongoing license to LiveData Platform alongside technical support to help enhance its architecture, developing products, and applying automated replication into the workflow.

"KOBIC uses the WANdisco live data platform to automate file transfer 13 times faster in both directions between Hadoop-based Big Data Analysis Program Execution Cluster (HDFS) and Linux-based Genomic Analysis Program Execution Cluster (Lustre)," said Kun-Hwan Ko, Researcher at KOBIC Computational Development Team. "We were able to reduce the overall average time to analyze user genomic data of Bio-Express service by more than 30 percent."

About WANdisco

WANdisco is the LiveData company. WANdisco solutions enable enterprises to create an environment where data is always available, accurate and protected, creating a strong backbone for their IT infrastructure and a bedrock for running consistent, accurate machine learning applications. With zero downtime and zero data loss, WANdisco LiveData Platform keeps geographically dispersed data at any scale consistent between on-premises and cloud environments allowing businesses to operate seamlessly in a hybrid or multi-cloud environment. For more information on WANdisco, visit www.wandisco.com.

About KOBIC

The Korea Bioinformation Center (KOBIC) is a national bio-resource information center for general management of domestic bio-resource information and research in the field of bioinformation. KOBIC helps domestic research institutes, hospitals, companies, and universities to research genomic data and Covid-19 for free. One of KOBIC's main missions is to develop and operate a system that can analyze large-scale genomic data using the state-of-the-art information technology.

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