The Nixon Lab in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB) rely on their Research IT provided server to run genome searches, genomic databases and other bioinformatic software systems as part of their day to day research . This provides an additional resource used to trial pipelines before running them on the CSF and for running ad hoc processing alongside CSF.
They had been using a 1.5TB Dell PowerEdge R640, which has served them well until now but it needed to be replaced by a newer, more powerful machine. The location of the new server was also needed to be changed to a more secure and fitting environment on the main campus.
Thanks to our Research Virtual Machine Service (RVMS) their old server has now been upgraded to a 4TB server running as an Incus instance. This provides a performance uplift to members of the research group on an updated release of Ubuntu, while giving us a more usable and complete support mechanism for the server itself. This reduces our workload supporting the server and improves the resilience of the machine itself.
The work was a team effort primarily carried out by Gaël Donval with support from Sarah Skelding. Chris Stead from the Nixon Lab acted as their liaison with Nixon Group and helped with the transition to the new server.
Keeping pace with the growing computational demands of our research means balancing computing power, data storage, bioinformatics tools and sequence databases. Research IT plays a crucial role in making that possible. Through the work of Gaël, Sarah and the wider Research IT team, we have been able to remove key computational bottlenecks, modernise the infrastructure supporting our analyses and make our bioinformatics workflows faster and more reliable. This support allows us to spend less time managing computational limitations and more time extracting meaningful biological insight from increasingly large and complex datasets.
If you have similar server requirements or if you would like a customisable, self-administered Ubuntu Linux based Virtual Machine, get in touch with the RVMS team for a chat!