More than a decade ago, a Fudan University professor launched the Taizhou Cohort in Taizhou to build an internationally leading, high-quality, high-standard population resource. Using biological samples and epidemiological data from a large cohort, researchers can clarify disease mechanisms and risk, raise prevention and control, and enable precision medicine.

The project built a large natural-population cohort framed on all residents of Taizhou and followed them for many years. It established a human genetic-resource platform and a health big-data platform, becoming China’s largest single-region biobank and accumulating petabyte-scale healthcare big-data resources.

Unlocking the value of Taizhou Cohort data: ParaStor as the storage base

Once the Taizhou Cohort was included in the national precision-medicine program, building the Taizhou Healthcare Big Data Platform became urgent. Sugon’s self-developed distributed storage system ParaStor recently built a storage base of more than 3 PB for the platform, efficiently supporting analysis, mining, and application of medical data.

The Taizhou Healthcare Big Data Platform was launched jointly by the Taizhou municipal government, the medical high-tech zone, and Fudan University. Its main users are university research departments and local medical institutions in Taizhou. Once complete, the shared platform is meant to scale more strongly, stably support exchange and sharing of medical data, and make it easier for outside organizations to use hospital data for deeper research—accelerating conversion of Taizhou’s medical-data value. The new big-data platform must therefore not only unify storage and sharing, but also efficiently support analysis, deep mining, and application of medical data.

Efficient, stable, and intelligently operated: supporting massive medical-data analysis

Sugon ParaStor uses a 100 Gb/s EDR InfiniBand high-speed storage network to meet the platform’s need for high aggregate bandwidth on large medical files and high IOPS on small files. Data on the big-data platform grows extremely fast. ParaStor scales to the exabyte level, with linear growth in performance and capacity, meeting requirements for processing power and scalability.

ParaStor also uses multiple techniques to guarantee high reliability and high availability from the physical layer to the logical layer, protecting storage, management, application, and sharing of medical data. It offers multi-dimensional resource management, multiple fault-warning mechanisms, and automatic detection and handling of dozens of sub-health states to keep the system stable. Visual operations and unified management of multiple clusters reduce operations pressure and cost.

With ParaStor as its storage base, the Taizhou Healthcare Big Data Platform has given a strong push to research on how genetic factors, environmental factors, and their interactions relate to major chronic diseases. ParaStor is favored by many healthcare and life-science customers for its efficiency and stability. Going forward, Sugon will continue to deliver innovative technology and products to power the rapid development of biological and genetic technology.