How CDW Helped SickKids Revamp Its Data Centre for Breakthrough Research

CDW Canada was selected to support SickKids’ technology integration, data migration and project facilitation requirements.

CDW helped SickKids upgrade and operationalize their high-performance computing (HPC) facility and other components while tackling the nuances of a regulated healthcare research organization.

The result was a collaborative partnership that allowed the SickKids RI to modernize its data centre efficiently while achieving desired technology outcomes.

Research capabilities at SickKids largely depend on the performance and scale of IT infrastructure. To advance research across several high-impact domains such as genome sequencing, drug discovery and more, the organization had the following IT priorities.

Servers and storage that process massive amounts of data often reach a performance ceiling as they age. More electricity is required to scale the environment for incremental performance, which was a growing concern for the SickKids Research IT team.

“The majority of our equipment was aging and we were reaching capacity in both physical capacity and storage capacity,” explained Fernando Silva, Manager, High Performance Computing, SickKids RI.

“As the storage cluster approached end of life, maintenance effort and operational overhead continued to increase.

“We were reaching 100 storage server nodes,” Silva noted. “The best practice is to prevent such a large number of server nodes in one cluster because it may impede performance.”

As research workloads grew in both size and complexity, performance bottlenecks, particularly related to storage latency, became increasingly apparent in parts of the environment.

“With respect to the virtualization platform back-end storage, we had some technical issues with the previous storage,” said Adam T., Senior Manager, Research IT Infrastructure, SickKids RI. “It worked well enough, but it had a bit higher latency than we would have liked.”

To reduce operational issues, SickKids wanted a virtualization storage solution that offered lower latency, higher throughput and better scalability.

Over time, the organization had accumulated multiple backup tools to support different parts of the infrastructure, resulting in fragmented processes and increased operational burden.

“We were struggling with the tape backups in terms of aging software licencing concerns and using multiple products,” Adam T. explained.

The team wanted to build a single solution for backups that would leverage existing investments in tape library infrastructure, improve backup and recovery times, allow easier backup management and improve cybersecurity posture

The SickKids RI runs on a highly skilled but lean IT team. “We’re a small team with tremendous expertise,” said MacLean, “but we are a team that is very busy with day-to-day operations.”

The refresh needed to scale infrastructure without adding staff or creating undue operational risk. The RI wanted to ensure that from an operations perspective, the data centre refresh did not raise their staff requirements so they could continue to manage the facility with the same team.

SickKids’ vision extended beyond simply bringing in new hardware. The goal was to build a modern, scalable foundation that could support advanced research computing, collaboration and compliance well into the future.

To that end, the SickKids RI has developed a uniquely advanced HPC environment.

“To my knowledge, we are the only site affiliated with the Digital Research Alliance of Canada that virtualizes their HPC services,” said Silva. “Not only do we virtualize our environment, but we’re also one of the few host sites that offer cloud services along with HPC services.”

CDW worked closely with the SickKids Research IT teams to fulfill technology needs, provide architectural support and resolve facility-related concerns for seamless project delivery. 

CDW played a significant role in SickKids’ HPC environment, which was running on older infrastructure and approaching both capacity and performance limits.

As the existing storage architecture lacked a flash tier, it generated high power consumption and performance ceilings as node counts increased. To solve this, CDW helped with the installation of flash storage into the existing environment.

CDW closely supported the entire storage upgrade process, which included:

• Coordinating vendor engagement and solution design
• Providing the optimal methodology for executing the data migration while ensuring it didn’t interrupt current operations
• Facilitating testing and validation to ensure performance expectations were met

CDW also helped ensure that the new architecture aligned with SickKids’ virtualization and sensitive data authorization requirements. This allowed SickKids to scale HPC capabilities without increasing physical or operational overhead.

As a part of the data storage upgrade, SickKids needed to migrate data from old systems to new ones securely. Migrating large-scale storage environments, particularly HPC storage, posed significant risk due to data volumes, user access dependencies and performance requirements.

CDW helped with the migration process by understanding the target environment and enabling a proven transfer pathway for the migration, which included:

• Facilitating access to storage expertise and tooling
• Helping coordinate testing, including access zone transfers
• Providing project orchestration across management, technical, architectural and service delivery aspects for SickKids
• Ensuring project constraints such as time, risk and budget were continuously handled

These measures helped SickKids boost confidence in achieving desired throughput and performance before full migration took place. It also ensured that there was minimal disruption to users and research workflows.

As SickKids faced storage latency issues tied to its previous NFS-based storage configuration, CDW helped shift to an NVMe-based SAN, better suited for virtualization.

The NVMe storage helps lower storage latency while also improving VM performance and responsiveness.

CDW helped with the storage upgrade by:

• Assessing the risk of introducing a second storage technology
• Bringing together the right storage architects and implementation specialists to validate design decisions, guide risk‑mitigation steps and ensure smooth transition
• Providing a more suitable storage solution for their evolving needs, which enabled them to achieve lower latency and easier scaling  

The result was a virtualization platform that could scale confidently as demand increased. Operational improvements include reducing the performance interruptions caused by virtual machine snapshots and better support for applications that are sensitive to even slight network delays.

One of the key strengths that CDW brings to the table is our broad ecosystem of technology partners. In this project, CDW’s solution architects were able to consult with SickKids Research IT team to align their investment with their best interests.

CDW’s industry partnerships allowed the team to focus on selecting the most appropriate technologies for SickKids’ environment, rather than being constrained by a single supplier roadmap.

From implementing performance improvements to securing backups, CDW facilitated key upgrades in the SickKids data centre.

By modernizing the storage architecture and introducing flash-based technologies, SickKids was able to overcome long-standing performance bottlenecks that limited scalability and efficiency.

“We have nine flash nodes and those nine flash nodes today could outperform the throughput and IOPS of our previous 96-node cluster,” said Silva.

Moving to a lower-latency storage architecture resulted in more responsive systems and improved stability for virtual machines supporting research and operational workloads.  

In addition to performance gains, the refresh delivered meaningful improvements in physical and operational efficiency within the data centre.

“This was the first year we transitioned to flash storage,” Silva said. “Once we introduced the flash storage, we reduced our footprint significantly and improved performance.”

For SickKids, this meant the ability to increase capacity and capability without expanding data centre space or incurring additional operational costs.

By consolidating multiple backup tools into a more unified approach, SickKids simplified day-to-day management while strengthening its security posture.

This consolidation reduced complexity for IT teams, improved visibility across backup operations and made it easier to apply consistent policies.

At the same time, the refreshed data centre provided enhanced cybersecurity controls, including encryption, helping SickKids better align with evolving regulatory expectations around data protection.

“With the help of CDW, a new solution was put in place leveraging our existing tape library assets with a refresh bringing all sorts of cybersecurity improvements and then putting all the backups under one pane of glass,” said Adam T.

Perhaps one of the most meaningful outcomes for the SickKids RI was the ability to significantly expand infrastructure capacity without increasing staffing levels.

“We were able to scale without having to add additional staff,” said MacLean. “Keeping our operational costs flat while we increase capacity is something we’re very pleased about.”

This outcome ensured that internal teams could remain focused on supporting researchers and advancing SickKids’ mission, rather than being overwhelmed by infrastructure management.

 “We didn't just have the CDW team as project managers and supplier coordinators, but also as technology experts,” MacLean said.

“Having this partnership is really valuable to us because there is so much great talent on the CDW team. They know the market well and are watching the industry in a way that we just don't have the capacity to do ourselves.”