Sugon Storage supports large-scale cryo-EM construction in Asia

As a major life-and-health science and innovation hub built by Zhejiang, Liangzhu Laboratory has initially established a key technology platform that can support the full chain of medical innovation and entrepreneurship. Recently, Liangzhu Laboratory joined hands with Sugon to build a high-performance cryo-EM platform, providing a port and path from the sub-nanometer micro scale and accelerating targeted-drug development.

Cryo-electron microscopy is used for ultra-low-temperature frozen sample preparation and transfer in scanning electron microscopy, allowing direct observation of liquids, semi-liquids, and samples sensitive to the electron beam. Through this technique, researchers can visualize the dynamic processes of biological change. Cryo-EM can help pharmaceutical companies with drug development and greatly accelerate the R&D process.

To meet laboratory needs, the cryo-EM storage platform faces the following challenges: data coming off the instruments reaches several TB per day; different file types have different IOPS needs; and a single storage system must support multiple application scenarios.

Facing extremely fast data growth from the cryo-EM platform, Sugon ParaStor offers EB-class scalability, with linear growth in performance and capacity to meet the platform's data-processing and expansion requirements. A 100Gb/s EDR Infiniband high-speed storage network efficiently addresses the platform's need for high aggregate bandwidth in large medical-file storage and high IOPS in small-file storage.

Meanwhile, Sugon ParaStor fuses file, object, block, and HDFS protocols, truly unifying massive heterogeneous data resources. Extreme file-storage performance helps break barriers in off-instrument data collection and transfer, making data preprocessing, visualization, and 2D/3D analysis more efficient. In addition, the ParaStor distributed storage system uses multiple technical means to guarantee high reliability and high availability from the physical layer through the logical layer.