UCI School of Medicine Supports Petabyte-Scale Research Data

The Challenge: Research Data Was Outgrowing Lab-by-Lab Storage

At UCI School of Medicine Research IT, storage is the foundation researchers depend on to capture, protect, and access the data behind their work.

Ron Pulido’s team supports the basic science side of the School of Medicine, primarily nonclinical research. When Ron joined, the storage environment was fragmented across lab-specific Synology systems. Each lab had its own setup, its own approach, and its own capacity limits.

When I got here about eight years ago, we were a variety of Synology NASes that were lab dependent or lab specific. It was kind of a wild west.
— Ron Pulido

That model worked for smaller labs. It got harder to sustain as research data grew. One principal investigator was already running six or seven Synology systems, including a large petabyte-scale unit. The pace of data growth quickly pushed past what that approach could comfortably support.

The pressure came from high-resolution biological imaging. One lab runs multiple light sheet microscopy systems, producing extremely large files during repeated imaging sessions.

These generate very high resolution biological imaging. At a clip, they will shoot out half a terabyte file, and they’re running these sessions in a row over multiple times during a week. So you can imagine the data just gets sucked up.
— Ron Pulido

In one case, a single PI went through roughly two petabytes in about a year and a half. Across the broader environment, UCI School of Medicine Research IT was managing around four petabytes of capacity, excluding that largest individual PI environment.

The team needed storage that could scale with research demand, support large unstructured datasets, and give a small IT group a more manageable path forward.

The Solution: A Platform That Scales and Stays Manageable

UCI’s main campus research computing team recommended looking at TrueNAS to support larger-scale storage. Ron’s team deployed TrueNAS and consolidated their growing research data onto a platform that combined the scale they needed with the day-to-day manageability they wanted.

For UCI School of Medicine Research IT, the use case is intentionally straightforward: large storage buckets for unstructured research data, mounted over SMB for labs and researchers.

We basically use these as big storage buckets of unstructured data. It’s all SMB mounted.

— Ron Pulido

That simplicity matters. Research IT teams support many labs, users, and projects at once. The goal is reliable, scalable storage that fits the environment researchers already use.

Pablo Lozano, who handles technical administration of the environment, pointed to how well TrueNAS fits UCI’s existing Windows and Active Directory workflows.

The fact that it seamlessly integrates with our normal Windows works amazing. Being able to have those ACLs translate easily has made it so that I could expand that as more of a departmental solution rather than just one PI in one lab.

— Pablo Lozano

With TrueNAS, the team creates lab-level shares, assigns each PI control over their own storage, and manages access through existing Active Directory groups and permissions. Pablo built one departmental TrueNAS system at roughly 1.5 petabytes on exactly this model.

Each lab has their own share. Each PI has their own control, their own groups and everything. It makes it really easy to manage.

— Pablo Lozano

The Outcome: Performance, Resilience, and Room to Grow

For research environments producing petabytes of data, performance and reliability are the job. Pablo described the TrueNAS environment as strong on both.

Performance has been great. It seems to scale pretty well with how we’ve populated that.

— Pablo Lozano

The resilience story carries just as much weight. After an operating system upgrade, the team saw drives reporting as down. The system kept running in a degraded state, and Pablo was able to identify the affected drives, swap them, and resilver the array back to full operation within the day.

For a research IT team, that outcome is the point. Researchers need access to their data. IT needs confidence that issues can be caught and resolved without disrupting critical work. Ron put it plainly.

I do feel confident about it. The way we set up this system, I think there’s a lot of resilience.

— Ron Pulido

A Right-Fit Platform for Research at Scale

Ron is clear that not every lab needs petabyte-scale infrastructure. Some labs only need around ten terabytes, and a smaller NAS is a better fit there. For research environments operating at the scale UCI School of Medicine Research IT supports, TrueNAS fits a different class of need. When the team weighed comparable enterprise platforms, those options came at a significantly higher price point for the same scale.

For UCI School of Medicine Research IT, those requirements are part of everyday research operations, not a thought experiment. As biological imaging and other data-intensive workflows keep growing, Ron’s team is already planning for larger storage, including expansion beyond the current deployment. TrueNAS gives them a foundation that supports that growth while bringing order to an environment that once ran on scattered, lab-by-lab systems.

For research teams managing fast-growing data, TrueNAS delivers scalable enterprise storage with the control and resilience to support critical work, without locking teams into a rigid storage model.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How much research data does UCI School of Medicine Research IT manage on TrueNAS?
A: UCI School of Medicine Research IT manages around four petabytes of capacity across its TrueNAS environment, not counting one individual lab that alone generated roughly two petabytes of imaging data in about a year and a half.

Q: What did UCI’s storage environment look like before TrueNAS?
A: Storage was fragmented across lab-specific Synology systems, each with its own setup and capacity limits — described by Ron Pulido as “kind of a wild west” — with one principal investigator alone running six or seven Synology systems, including a large petabyte-scale unit.