Qumulo Storage

The preservation and accessibility of scientific research data are essential to the NIA research mission. Research data represent significant scientific and financial investments and must remain available to support ongoing studies, future analyses, regulatory requirements, and scientific reproducibility. NIA maintains numerous critical research datasets, including more than 60 years of data from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), the nation's longest-running scientific study of human aging. These irreplaceable datasets require a secure, reliable, and scalable storage infrastructure to ensure their long-term preservation and availability. NIA-IRP's enterprise storage infrastructure has relied primarily on hard disk drive (HDD)-based storage arrays. Although HDD-based systems have provided cost-effective storage, they are significantly slower than the existing Qumulo storage platform and are more susceptible to hardware failure. As research data generated from genomics, imaging, proteomics, clinical studies, and other data-intensive workflows continue to grow, additional storage capacity has become essential. Expanding the existing Qumulo storage environment provides a seamless and scalable solution while maintaining consistent performance and centralized management. The objective of this acquisition is to procure additional Qumulo storage capacity to expand the existing enterprise storage environment. The additional capacity will provide high-throughput, low-latency access to unstructured file data, improve data access performance, reduce backup and recovery times, and enhance data protection through Qumulo Secure software-based encryption. This acquisition will provide a modern, scalable, secure, and reliable storage platform that supports current and future NIA-IRP biomedical research activities.