CAMBRIDGE, UK – March 21. 2012 – HP today announced that the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute (CRI) has deployed HP Converged Infrastructure, including HP storage and HP servers, to support its complex research activities.

The CRI is directly funded by Cancer Research, the world’s leading charity directed to saving lives through research. The organisation focuses on the practical application of high-quality cancer research, forming a bridge between the University of Cambridge and the Addenbrooke's Hospital. The Institute is the nucleus of the wider virtual Cambridge Cancer Centre, which brings together research groups from the University and local biotechnology companies to work on cross-disciplinary projects and share resources.

Having migrated its data from inflexible islands of discrete storage to a single file system-based archive platform, the CRI added an enterprise-class HP IBRIX X9720 Network Storage system to its existing HP Converged Infrastructure. The HP IBRIX X9720 delivers the highest levels of performance, protection and availability to support the CRI’s computationally intensive genome sequencing and analysis workloads.

“The HP IBRIX X9720 was more scalable and cost-effective than competitive storage offerings with the feature set we were looking for,” says Peter Maccallum, Head of IT & Scientific Computing at the CRI. “As it is based on HP technology which the CRI already successfully uses, we were able to upgrade our storage capacity smoothly, and can support it with existing staff. The clear upgrade and expansion path will allow the Institute’s scientists to grow their datasets to the petabyte scale with seamless, continuous access to data, allowing them to focus on research into new ways to save lives, which is our number one priority.”

The HP IBRIX X9720 Network Storage system creates a centrally-managed pool of 328TB of storage across 2 sites, with a multi-tiered approach to storage that simplifies management and reduces costs. The CRI can manage the data lifecycle simply and cost-effectively without having to copy data between tiers of storage, and researchers can easily access files without knowing their location. Capacity and performance can be easily scaled out to accommodate the CRI’s massively growing stores of genetic, molecular and imaging data.

Two HP MSL8096 tape libraries provide backup for the CRI’s data centers, ensuring complete continuity for research activities in the event of a disaster. HP Data Protector software protects the CRI’s virtual and physical applications from a central console, automating backup and simplifying data recovery.

To reduce power consumption, legacy servers have been replaced with an HP ProLiant BladeSystem c7000 enclosure and HP ProLiant BL490c G6 and G7 servers. This new infrastructure delivers the performance, density and expandability required to support CRI’s demanding applications while meeting their goal to reduce administrative overhead. HP Converged Infrastructure provides a strategic platform for CRI’s storage growth over coming years.

HP’s premier client event, HP Discover, takes place June 4-7 in Las Vegas.