Western Digital and Qumulo Enable Massive Capacity and Scale for IHME COVID-19 Health Analytics and Vaccine Roll Out

Architecting how data enables the world to solve its biggest problems, Western Digital Corp. announced on Tuesday, January 26, 2021 that the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), in partnership with Qumulo, a breakthrough leader in file data management for hybrid cloud environments, is employing Western Digital’s Ultrastar DC HC550 18TB HDDs and Ultrastar DC SN640 NVMeTM SSDs for ongoing COVID-19 research and vaccine rollout.

IHME, based at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, is an independent global health research organization. Their mission is to improve the health of the world’s population by providing the best freely available public health information to policymakers and healthcare institutions. By providing this data, organizations can make informed decisions critical to saving lives.

“When the World Health Organization officially announced a pandemic, requests from hospitals, state governments and other countries started pouring in for models of data and forecasts,” said Serkan Yalcin, director of IT Infrastructure at IHME. “Teaming up with Qumulo from the beginning and utilizing Western Digital drives has enabled us to distill hundreds of millions of data points into a single visualization which allows policymakers to easily view results and communicate them with their teams. Now, as vaccines are rolling out around the world, we have been able to further extend projections with even more data to give decision makers the most robust information possible.”

Capturing and analyzing large data sets requires top-of-the-line storage infrastructure. Qumulo provides file data platforms to help organizations easily store and manage file data. The C-432T offers a cached- performance hybrid storage system for data center, private and public cloud environments. This high-performance system yields a dynamically scalable architecture and real-time visibility of data imperative to organizations like IHME with massive amounts of data.

Qumulo’s system includes Western Digital’s Ultrastar DC HC550 18TB HDDs with HelioSeal® technology for their high capacities, low power and high reliability. Ultrastar DC SN640 NVMe SSDs are leveraged to provide extreme performance with six times improvement in sequential read compared to SATA SSDs, which allows for faster data analysis. With Western Digital’s vertically integrated storage devices, Qumulo’s C-432T provides 432TB of raw storage capacity in a 2U configuration.

“Partnering with Western Digital helped us to deliver a fast, reliable file data platform to IHME that analyzes up to 20x more data every day than previous solutions,” said Ben Gitenstein, vice president of product at Qumulo. “Our software-driven platform offers enterprise-level capabilities that radically simplifies analytics of massive data sets which is critical for customers to be successful with unstructured data. This partnership with Western Digital allows customers like IHME to simplify the complexity of their infrastructure, accelerate innovation and unleash the power of their data, wherever it resides.”

“Scaling for increased data demand is a common hurdle organizations face. In this case, the increase of data was sudden and exponential,” said Andrew Dorian, vice president of data center hard drives at Western Digital. “We’re honored to work with Qumulo to provide the storage foundation to help IHME create data-driven, science-based, actionable plans to combat COVID-19. In partnership with Qumulo, we were able to quickly provide a scalable on-premises file storage system with high-capacity HDDs and high-performance NVMe SSDs to address a surge in data that benefits people everywhere.”