Pure Storage Accelerates McMaster University's Lab in the Fight Against COVID-19

Modern storage infrastructure helps McArthur Lab speed up lifesaving results

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Aug 18, 2020, 09:00 ET

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Aug. 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the IT pioneer that delivers storage as-a-service in a multi-cloud world, announced today that the McArthur lab at McMaster University is using Pure's FlashBlade^TM as its backbone in the fight against antibiotic resistance in superbugs through data.

As superbug resistance and the growing global scourge of COVID-19 places modern medicine under siege, the McArthur Lab is fighting back. Somewhere in the millions of data points processed in the lab daily, there's a new treatment waiting to be discovered.

In charge of the lab is genomics professor and researcher Andrew McArthur, Ph.D. He is using Pure's technology to accelerate decision-making in the fight against life-threatening superbugs and viruses like COVID-19.

To support this mission, McArthur made the decision to use FlashBlade, the most advanced unified fast file and object storage platform designed to handle highly complex processes associated with massive genomic datasets. This sped up the time to research and seek cures for superbugs. When COVID-19 hit, the lab was able to pivot immediately and leverage the innovative high-performance infrastructure already in place to combat the virus.

"There's no point in playing with traditional storage because it's just not fast enough," said Andrew G. McArthur, Ph.D., McMaster University. "With Pure Storage we can stay ahead of the curve as we fight global threats to human health."

Using data, and backed by the modern storage infrastructure from Pure, the McArthur Lab developed a tool for the international health sciences community that can help determine how the virus that causes COVID-19 is spreading and whether it is evolving. The tool tracks how the virus changes over time, how it transmits between people and how well it survives outside the body – it can help scientists understand if the virus has evolved between patient A and patient B.

"Data is critical to the daily insights in the lab," said McArthur. "However, the vast and growing amount of information relies on near-instant processing times. By replacing our legacy storage infrastructure with Pure, we have the ability to gain insight into the virus through next-generation sequencing."

As gene sequencing technology continues to advance, rapid scalability and performance will remain critical to the lab's efforts.

"The need to quickly identify and respond to global threats to human health has never been clearer," said Josh Gluck, Vice President of Global Healthcare Technology Strategy at Pure Storage. "With FlashBlade, researchers at McArthur Lab can continue to conduct research that has widespread global impact."

Read the case study to learn more about how the McArthur Lab at McMaster is using next generation technology in the fight against superbugs.

About Pure Storage
Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) gives technologists their time back. Pure delivers a modern data experience that empowers organizations to run their operations as a true, automated, storage as-a-service model seamlessly across multiple clouds. One of the fastest-growing enterprise IT companies in history, Pure helps customers put data to use while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it. And with a certified customer satisfaction score in the top one percent of B2B companies, Pure's ever-expanding list of customers are among the happiest in the world.

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