REANNZ expands high‑performance storage in partnership with WEKA and Dell

REANNZ is taking another step forward in supporting New Zealand’s research community, thanks to a recent expansion of storage capabilities on its Mahuika high‑performance computing (HPC) platform.

“We've enhanced Mahuika’s performance, resilience, and long‑term capacity for supporting a range of workloads,” says Blair Bethwaite, REANNZ Solutions Manager. “Backed by the expertise and technology of WEKA and Dell, we’re delivering a storage ecosystem that empowers researchers to keep pushing the boundaries of data‑intensive science." 

Over the past year, research teams across Aotearoa New Zealand have increasingly relied on Mahuika's HPC capabilities to process and analyse large datasets, from genomics workflows to engineering simulations to Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications.

Mahuika's new storage infrastructure, built with technologies from WEKA and Dell, has expanded our backup capacity and improved the system’s reliability and responsiveness.

“The improvements we’ve made directly reflect learnings from the new platform’s first six months of operations,” says Blair. “By working closely with WEKA and Dell, we’ve evolved Mahuika’s storage capabilities based on real-world operational insights and the needs of the research community.”

Better support for data-intensive workflows

From a user perspective, researchers will see benefits through an uplift in Mahuika’s Input/Output (I/O) performance, the measure of how quickly a system can read, write, and move data.

Annabel Whibley, a Bioinformatician in the Grapevine Improvement team at Bragato Research Institute, has noticed. She relies on Mahuika to store and manage their large genomics datasets, including those underpinning their core industry research projects and their commercial sequencing services.

"The new storage infrastructure is noticeably better integrated and has streamlined our data processing and archiving workflows,” says Annabel. “All these system efficiency gains really add up to accelerate the pace at which we can deliver impact, particularly as genomics continues to scale toward more data-intensive, AI-enabled approaches.”

Thanks to the upgrade, Mahuika's filesystem I/O performance has nearly doubled, enabling total throughput of 376 GB/s reads and 71 GB/s writes.

“That gives us plenty of headroom for more data-intensive workloads, particularly for those applying machine learning and other AI-driven tasks,” says Blair.

A view of the new storage equipment prior to its installation at the Tāmaki Data Centre.

Keeping pace with modern research

"New Zealand's research community is tackling some of the most computationally demanding challenges in science, from genomics to AI-driven simulations, and they deserve infrastructure that keeps pace with their ambitions," says Shimon Ben-David, Chief Technology Officer, WEKA.

“Partnering with REANNZ and Dell to expand Mahuika's storage capabilities is a great example of how NeuralMesh by WEKA delivers real, measurable impact where it matters most: faster I/O, greater throughput, and a resilient foundation that grows alongside the needs of researchers. We're proud to support REANNZ in empowering New Zealand's scientific community to push the boundaries of data-intensive discovery."

With researchers generating and analysing more data than ever before, REANNZ’s technology roadmap will keep pace with the evolving needs of research and support the growing scale of New Zealand’s research data.

Next on the list, REANNZ is exploring ways to improve Mahuika’s performance when reading data from underlying object storage. This will help researchers access large or archived datasets more quickly, reducing delays when their workflows need to pull data from our longer-term storage facilities.

If you'd like more information about Mahuika or our technology roadmap, get in touch.