HPE Alletra modernizes IT at Australian cancer research firm
Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute in Melbourne leans on HPE Alletra storage and servers to modernize infrastructure and look to a private cloud future.
LAS VEGAS -- An Australian cancer research firm's storage hardware refresh with HPE brings hybrid cloud functionality to a small but dedicated IT team while opening opportunities for AI and other emerging technologies.
Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute (ONJCRI), headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, and founded in 2014, is an independent medical research institute dedicated to researching cancer treatments and diagnostics.
The founding was also the last time the organization refreshed its storage hardware, said Dr. Christine De Nardo, chief operations officer at ONJCRI.
Although De Nardo knew the organization would need to shop around for an acceptable price, since the charitable organization operates on a tight budget, she wanted a partner vendor that would help support the organization's cause.
Dr. Christine De Nardo
"We weren't looking for a transactional experience," she said. "We wanted a genuine partnership and a chance to collaborate in the future. That's imperative for us."
HPE's Alletra offerings and support services met her needs of transition off the older hardware, expediting IT tasks and setting up future technology expansions, De Nardo said.
ONJCRI's goal is to make things more tolerable, accessible and effective for cancer patients, she explained.
"A big part of my role is taking care of those research-adjacent tasks and making sure that we're creating all the operational efficiencies and the ability to genuinely be putting more resources, more funding and more time into the [work our] researchers are doing," De Nardo said.
Medical modernization
De Nardo started her position at ONJCRI in early 2024 and set to work examining the organization's structure and understanding individual department needs.
ONJCRI operates within Austin Hospital, a public teaching hospital, and works with many patients undergoing treatment for research data and testing. The charity has a total staff of 126 employees, including clinicians, researchers and non-medical support staff. It also supports 60 honorary staff members and about 50 students. Funding comes primarily through government grants, as well as separate fundraising efforts.
De Nardo oversees the managers of the organization's numerous departments and reports directly to the ONJCRI CEO and board.
The IT team consists of just three individuals, she said. Those employees warned her that the existing storage hardware had been in service since ONJCRI's founding, but a refresh could be an opportunity for modernization.
"It was very clear the storage [hardware] they had was nearing end of life," De Nardo said. "We're in an age where research instruments are developing at such a fast rate that it means more data that we need to be able to protect, share and collaborate with."
This storage hardware originally needed to handle only about 14 TB annually, but that amount has since increased to 250 TB, with hundreds more expected from improvements in data capture across labs and new hardware.
Finding ways to better use existing and incoming data was paramount, she said. The old storage hardware became a bottleneck for newer medical equipment, as imaging software would demand higher performance than the existing infrastructure could deliver.
"We needed to be able to safely store data, but that data is only as good as what you can do with it," De Nardo said. "The reality is we could already have a breakthrough treatment in the historical data we have, let alone the new data that is coming off the [instruments]."
Her team ultimately settled on a combination of HPE's Alletra Storage MP B10000, a block and file storage system, and HPE Alletra Storage Server 4000 with Qumulo storage software and cloud connectivity through S3-compatible object storage.
We're just starting this journey and we needed to get the plumbing correct early.
Dr. Christine De NardoChief operations officer, ONJCRI
These options not only give the IT team its hardware refresh but also set up infrastructure for cloud expansion in the future. De Nardo and the team chose HPE not only for the hardware but also for the vendor's ongoing support for the existing hardware during the replacement.
"We're just starting this journey, and we needed to get the plumbing correct early," she said. "The HPE Qumulo solution really allowed us to be flexible in that capability and move data into the cloud when we needed to and share it when we needed to."
She said she'd eventually like to connect ONJCRI into private cloud services to take advantage of new AI capabilities while maintaining sovereignty over medical data
"We'll be looking at how we safely experiment in the cloud and consider some closed options as we explore, especially with AI."
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
Dr. Christine De Nardo
