When WuXi NextCODE Genomics Inc. was struggling with network scalability issues for its highly complex genomic sequencing datasets, its commitment to a cloud infrastructure was called into question. Presented with NetApp’s Cloud Volumes fully managed cloud storage solution for its dense workloads, the company’s chief information officer devised a basic query to test it out. WuXi NextCODE is still in the cloud.

“It was essentially a query that touched on the order of 20 trillion data points,” said Hákon Guðbjartsson (pictured, left), chief information officer of WuXi NextCODE. “We were able to run that to completion in a time we were very satisfied with. We are kind of reborn now in the cloud.”

Guðbjartsson spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. He was joined by Jonsi Stefansson (pictured, right), vice president and chief technology officer of cloud at NetApp Inc., and they discussed the benefits of using Cloud Volumes for dense production workloads and the future impact of NetApp’s Data Fabric offering. (* Disclosure below.)

Solving storage bottlenecks

As an Amazon Web Services Inc. customer, Wuxi NextCODE had worked with NetApp to move a significant amount of its production workloads into the cloud. But it was encountering storage bottlenecks when working on dense production datasets using standard cloud-based networking tools.

“That’s been something these research companies have been struggling with,” Stefansson said. “Cloud Volumes addresses that with data management capabilities and the performance tiers that we offer. You don’t need to be continuously running at extreme, only when you actually need to.”

In addition to its Cloud Volumes offering, NetApp has also developed a relatively new architecture — Data Fabric — designed to integrate data management across both on-premises and cloud platforms. It’s an approach that WuXi NextCODE’s CIO sees as offering promise in a world where his company’s pharmaceutical customers are adopting a hybrid model.

“Having a Data Fabric infrastructure that allows you to bridge the two is something that makes a lot of sense with where people want to go in the future,” Guðbjartsson said. “Customers are more willing now to go into the cloud.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: NetApp Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither NetApp nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE