Fathom Global

Using HPC-optimised fast flash storage to drive analytical improvements

Published 27 FEB 2023

Fathom – a growing business with serious storage needs

Bristol-based Fathom is a leading player in water risk intelligence. Founded in 2013, it is the scale-up’s mission is to provide scientifically rigorous water and climate information for the benefit of businesses and communities worldwide. A specialist in risk modelling, Fathom has grown rapidly over the last two years, increasing the size of its team threefold and expanding its reach across a wide range of highly specialised sectors. With this has come the need for a technological solution that can accommodate a significant increase in compute power and storage capacity.

Leveraging NetApp FS270 Storage to implement performance gains in Flood Risk Modelling

Project Background

Fathom provides a range of high-resolution flood data, map and models that are capable of representing the physical processes of flooding for the entire world. Having been formed out of the University of Bristol, their team of scientists have spent the last decade researching and developing tools that can not only tell us our flood risk of today but also how this will change in the future - under a range of possible climate scenarios. These sophisticated technologies are immensely detailed featuring a large range of geographical data such as terrain, river networks and extreme flows. The result is data expensive products that require several hundreds of terabytes of data to produce their end-data. To host, maintain and run these data, Fathom has an in-house Data Centre, looked after by a team of IT specialists.

Terrain Data

Channel Data

Discharge Data

Automation

Project Approach

Fathom’s work centres on complex computational fluid dynamics and flood modelling workloads, which requires considerable high performance compute and suitably capable storage capacity and performance to feed the compute systems with consistent volumes of data. With demands on its existing hardware cluster growing to the point where it could envisage potential capacity issues, it turned to Scan Business for advice. Daniel Parkinson, Director of Collaboration at Scan, takes up the story, ‘We were tasked with centralising the storage for Fathom’s hardware cluster. Originally, they were looking at a combination of commodity servers and hard drives but that wouldn’t have been right for them and that’s when we recommended NetApp’. Following a presentation on the NetApp portfolio and technologies, Fathom accepted a recommendation to purchase and implement several NetApp FAS2720 Storage Array units.

These had raw storage capacity of 384TB and a usable capacity of 180TB, plus built-in data protection, security and rapid recovery capability. In addition the arrays come with simple and highly effective data management software, ONTAP. In Daniel Parkinson’s view, this really made the difference for Fathom. ‘Simplicity is the key. ONTAP provides extensive functionality for the customer and simplifies every aspect of the day to day management of their data. They have seen real gains and benefits in that respect.’

Conclusions

By consolidating all of the company’s storage with cloud-ready NetApp solutions, Fathom has seen significant gains in storage performance and in data management process efficiency. It has also paved the way to expand its capacity further with the option of moving towards the adoption of a hybrid storage infrastructure in the future.

The Scan Partnership

Scan is a system integrator and infrastructure specialist that offers a complete service, from design and delivery of cutting edge technology solutions, to installation, service and support. NetApp’s storage appliances are a perfect fit for Scan Business infrastructure solutions and they have invested in putting its sales and technical teams through the appropriate training and accreditation to ensure it they have up-to-date knowledge and capability to effectively deliver NetApp solutions. As well as being a NetApp Gold Partner, Scan is a leading expert in NetApp’s AI solutions, which combine all-flash, fabric-attached storage and advanced infrastructure to deliver ground-breaking performance for advanced HPC and AI deployments.