Through the partnership with Hitachi Vantara (formerly known as Hitachi Data Systems), Intersect is able to facilitate research collaboration in areas as vital and diverse as medical research, astrophysics, environmental modelling and monitoring, cultural heritage protection, and many others. Research data hosted on the Intersect facility is accessible through a secure multitenant content cloud that enables file sharing, databases and applications via a virtual portal on a Hitachi storage system.
The facility is tightly integrated with Intersect’s large-scale computing platforms, allowing Intersect to provide a world leading, unified service that supports its members’ diverse research activities. It is also connected via a dedicated, high-speed network through AARNet to Australia's research infrastructure making possible effective and efficient national and international collaboration.
Intersect CEO, Dr. Ian Gibson, said: "The Intersect facility allows leading research institutions such as the Westmead Millennium Institute, which houses the Australian Breast Cancer Tissue Bank, to solve big data problems that involve geographically dispersed clinicians and research teams. The reliability, robustness and scale out capabilities of the Hitachi Vantara infrastructure let us provide an ideal platform of high value services to research groups. This makes it possible for our researchers to securely store and share their data with collaborating partners, and to meet their various legislative and compliance requirements.”
View short video clips throughout this case study about Intersect Australia and their partnership with Hitachi Vantara (formerly known as Hitachi Data Systems) (2min, 53s).
He added, “Hitachi Vantara and Intersect share a commitment and dedication to R&D and innovation. We are honoured to receive the Health and Life Sciences Innovation Award in recognition of the benefits that data driven research can bring to society as a whole."
Intersect was created to store and protect research data from 14 different universities and research organisations. Would it be possible to bring together complex heterogeneous data from different sources on a single, safe, searchable database?
Intersect needed a readily scalable solution which would allow for different types of data to be stored under different access protocols, on a single, searchable database. Why was Hitachi the right technology to choose?
A vast stable database which made it possible for data to be searched, shared or downloaded according to strict access protocols. Is it possible to make data both safe and searchable?
By consolidating data from different sources Intersect makes it possible for researchers to look for patterns across different kinds of data, offering new solutions to opaque complex problems. Can access to large sets of heterogeneous data help researchers solve some of our most intractable medical and social problems?
Intersect is Australia's largest full-service eResearch support agency. Located in Sydney, Australia, they aim to help solve some of the biggest questions in the world of science, including how the universe started, finding a cure for cancer, and mapping climate change. Intersect works with the research sector to identify, develop and deliver world-class ICT enabled platforms to drive the next generation of research and innovation. Intersect provides cost effective information infrastructure, data storage, high performance computing, software development, training and expert consulting services for its 11 university members, affiliated members (the Office of Environment and Heritage, the Sax Institute, Sirca and CSIRO) and for non-members.
We need to provide a high-bandwidth environment and error-recovery with self-repairing software that ensures no loss of data and a very low file-corruption rate. Hitachi provided us with those software features and we are now able to manage vast amounts of scientific information.
Dr. Ian Gibson
CEO, Intersect Australia
The new research data storage facility serves as a cloud archive, storage and collaboration portal for data-driven research projects in Australia and around the world. With more than 30 projects already live, Intersect enables new research methodologies and collaborations with the help of an integrated Hitachi infrastructure and content management solution.
On the next page, we will explain how Intersect has responded to the challenges of consolidating Australia’s research data.
