Storage Performance That Helps Save Lives

Genomic analysis has big potential to save lives and French hospital AP-HM wanted to speed up analysis and accelerate diagnosis and treatment. It switched to a high-performance infrastructure powered by Pure Storage and consolidated its work into a “biogénopole,” a hub for medical biology, genetics, and anatomic-cytopathology research used by the hospitals of Marseille.

Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Marseille (AP-HM) is one of France's largest university hospitals. With more than 2,000 physicians and over 12,000 non-medical staff, AP-HM offers a wide range of medical and surgical services. The hospital is also recognized for its contributions to medical innovation and research, particularly in the field of molecular biology. AP-HM has 1,600 clinical research programs and nearly 12,000 patients in clinical trials.

Whether it's to diagnose a rare disease, personalize a cancer treatment, or combat an emerging epidemic, fast molecular biology analysis, including genomic analysis, is essential. It enables physicians to act faster, and with greater precision, sometimes making the difference between life and death.

To improve the performance of genomic analysis, AP-HM set up a “bionénopôle,” a hub that brings together medical biology, genetics, and anatomic-cytopathology at the hospitals of Marseille to centralize biological research and laboratories into one site.

"We conducted analysis across several sites, each of which had its own storage and VMware virtual machines (VMs) operating from two data centers," explains Renaud Massé, IT infrastructure manager at AP-HM. "In a field where time is a decisive factor, we needed to consolidate resources and improve performance. We decided to create a centralized architecture dedicated to genomic research."

AP-HM was already using Pure Storage FlashArray//X™ and FlashArray//C™ for general storage and data protection. The proactive support, ease of management, and performance from Pure Storage stood out. "Pure Storage provided us with excellent performance and capacity at the best cost," says Massé.

When building infrastructure to power the bionénopôle, the hub that brings together all specialties of medical biology, genetics, and anatomic-cytopathology at the hospitals of Marseille, AP-HM wanted to tap into the Pure Storage platform's consistency and opted to conduct a FlashBlade proof of concept (PoC). Pure Storage provided a FlashBlade array in a production configuration, enabling AP-HM to test performance under real conditions for three months. During this period, Pure Storage teams helped AP-HM bioinformaticians to optimize the entire infrastructure and software configuration.

"The bioinformaticians appreciated the commitment of Pure Storage, which enabled them to check that the storage met their needs and to confirm the quality, responsiveness, and relevance of the support," says Massé.

The AP-HM team immediately noticed significant performance gains after deploying a dedicated infrastructure using Pure Storage solutions. Where bioinformaticians previously took an average of 11 hours for a genomic analysis, they now take just 4 hours—75% faster. 

"We can attribute the seven hours we’ve saved in delivering genomic analysis to the performance of this new platform using Pure Storage solutions. This represents more than just numbers: It leads to faster diagnoses and potentially saved lives," emphasizes Massé.

A model of performance and operational efficiency, the AP-HM medical biology center also stands out for its sustainability. The Pure Storage platform reduced storage footprint from 26U to 6U—a 77% reduction—which also helped reduce electricity consumption by around 30%.

Beyond the impressive figures, a whole new horizon of possibilities is opening up for AP-HM. With this high-performance, highly scalable infrastructure, AP-HM now has unprecedented analysis capacity capable of adapting to future challenges. This technological flexibility helps put AP-HM at the forefront of medicine where rapid analysis is a powerful catalyst for hope, providing new potential to save lives.