AbbVie is focusing on internal global data transfers using Globus Connect Personal due to their data volumes growing rapidly through collaboration and acquisitions. They have deployed Globus Connect Personal on virtual machines close to compute and storage resources across different regional datacenters and campus facilities. This allows them to easily transfer large amounts of data, including genomics data, between locations while leveraging their high-speed private network and without requiring incoming connections due to security restrictions. They have already moved multiple terabytes of data between sites using this method.

1. Internal Global Data Transfers for
Commercial Enterprise Utilizing Globus
Connect Personal
May 10, 2022

2. AbbVie was founded in 2013 when it
became a separate company from Abbott.
Today, ~48,000 employees around the
world focus on discovering and delivering
transformational medicines and products in
several key therapeutic areas:
immunology, oncology, neuroscience, eye
care, virology, and women’s health, as well
as through our Allergan Aesthetics
portfolio.
Our mission is to discover and
deliver innovative medicines
and products that solve
serious health issues and
enhance people’s lives today
and address the medical
challenges of tomorrow.

3. AbbVie Science DMZ • AbbVie Science DMZ was built in 2017.
• It was based on BioTeam
recommendations for AbbVie
• Science DMZ is located in Lake County, IL
• It is leveraging 10 Gb/s Internet2 AL2S
connectivity
• It is heavily used for daily data transfers to
and from NCSA, ANL and AWS
• Limited use of I2 and Globus for external
data transfers. Globus is not widely
adopted by private sector
• For 5 years since the introduction of
Science DMZ there were few transfers.
(USC, QMUL, NYGC )
• Using AWS S3 buckets for external data
transfers from AbbVie partners
Posix DTN S3 DTN
GCS v4

4. Needs for Internal Data Transfers
EU
Site
EU
DC
EU
DC
Edge
CCF
Edge
End
User
Science
DMZ
Driving forces behind the internal data transfers:
• AbbVie data volumes grow organically as well
as through collaboration and data acquisitions
• Explosive growth of Genomics data
• HPC Compute and Storage resources are
scattered across different sites, data gravity
issues
• Global nature of R&D teams
• Data friction issues ( data ownership and data
sharing )
• Restricted and secret data – use SDWAN
backbone
• Cloud is expensive and not intuitive for
scientists
• Single threaded applications like scp, rsync
are not sufficient any more

5. Globus Connect Server vs. Globus Connect Personal
for Interface Data Transfers
• AbbVie security doesn’t allow
incoming connections to
internal applications
• Access to
NTFS/SMB/NFS/Posix
filesystems required
• Adding I2 and Science DMZ
to every location was not cost
effective
• SDWAN should be used for
internal data transfers to
avoid cost and data
encryption overhead
• Outgoing connections for
GCP
GCS GCP

6. Globus Connect Personal Deployment
• Leveraged existing Hyper Converged Infrastructure(HCI) to provision Virtual Machines close to the
compute and storage resources (Regional Datacenters and Campus Compute Faculties)
• Deployed Globus Connect Personal onto the provisioned VMs and created managed endpoints
• Demonstrated up to 4 Gb/s sustained and up to 7.5 Gb/s peak transfer speeds over global 10 Gb/s
links
• Data transfers are limited by the speed of the underlying storage
• Deployed for both Windows and Linux
• Leveraged full and sync transfers option in Globus
• Implemented several projects already, moved multiple TBs of data between datacenters as well as to
AWS Cloud
• Easy penetration of internal firewalls
• Virtual Machines Sizing example:
Globus Transfers
speed setting
VM # CPUs VM Memory VM Network
1-2 ”normal” transfers 8 16 GB 10 Gb/s
2-3 “normal” or
1-2 ”aggressive”
16 24 GB 10 Gb/s