Network Automation Fuels Scientific Innovation and Discovery

Written with Mara Fowler, Cisco Customer Stories

Over the past several centuries, significant scientific discoveries have fueled the rise of modern medicine.  Researchers like Pasteur, Fleming, and Salk identified groundbreaking medical treatments that saved untold numbers of lives.  During this time of medical innovation, Chemical Abstracts, which would later become Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), now an important division of the American Chemical Society (ACS), was established.

With its exceptional scope of scientific information, CAS is the gold standard for providing the research solutions behind thousands of science experiments and medical cures. CAS collects, analyzes and shares chemical data with researchers around the world, which fuels scientific innovation and new drug paradigms.  This indispensable information, taken from a wide range of scientific journals, patent authorities, and regulatory agencies, is stored in multiple databases and needs to be available on demand. This is critical as CAS’s customers need instant access to accurate, secure scientific data in order to develop tomorrow’s breakthroughs and patents.

However, managing the network traffic for this vast trove of vital information became increasingly difficult for CAS.  Saddled with the low-level, manual tasks required to support a traditional network, CAS engineers were challenged to meet increasing demands to deploy solutions with agility and speed.   The organization needed to transform itself to be able to rapidly and securely deliver solutions through the use of automation.  To accomplish this, CAS turned to Cisco’s SDN solution, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI).

By incorporating Cisco’s ACI solution and streamlining its network infrastructure into an application-based policy, CAS increased its network bandwidth throughput by a factor of four. Time-consuming tasks like resource provisioning were automated with ACI. This allowed engineers to focus on higher-level projects, such as building out its cloud environment which will drive its business forward.  In addition, the solution allows for a data center that’s secure, yet flexible enough to manage the future growth of CAS’s chemical content and its corresponding demand.

This increased operational efficiency has allowed CAS to focus on the things that matter; in this case organizing millions of pieces of scientific data and ensuring researchers have access to it. Through network automation and a digital foundation built with Cisco, CAS can bring new research solutions to market and tap into new areas of scientific discovery.  Pairing Cisco technology with CAS’s research solutions is paving the way for the next groundbreaking scientific discovery; the next cure for a disease; the next medical revolution.  There’s never been a better time to save a life.

To learn more about Cisco ACI, go here, or how it helped CAS, go here.