NIH-Grade Clustered Storage Design Using EMC And NetApp

9 Jul
Posted on Author

Authors: Taslima Akhter, Mehedi Hasan, Nusrat Jahan, Farhan Kabir

Abstract: The growing demands of NIH-funded biomedical research—spanning genomics, imaging, clinical trials, and omics sciences—necessitate advanced, compliant, and high-availability storage infrastructures. This review explores clustered storage design strategies using EMC and NetApp technologies to support NIH-scale data processing and long-term retention. It discusses the unique requirements of biomedical workloads, including regulatory compliance (HIPAA, FISMA), workload diversity (EHR, PACS, sequencing), and operational continuity. The paper analyzes EMC architectures such as PowerMax, Unity XT, VPLEX, and SRDF, alongside NetApp’s ONTAP, MetroCluster, FlexGroup, and SnapMirror offerings, emphasizing their suitability for high-throughput, secure, and scalable deployments. Key topics include secure multi-tenancy, disaster recovery, access control, telemetry integration, and hybrid cloud readiness. Case studies illustrate real-world implementations in genomics labs, collaborative research platforms, and medical imaging repositories. The review also highlights future directions such as AI-augmented storage management, composable infrastructure, and cloud convergence, offering a blueprint for NIH-aligned institutions seeking resilient and policy-compliant storage environments. Ultimately, the paper underscores the importance of a modular, secure, and observability-rich storage foundation to support data-driven biomedical research at scale.

DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15847962