IBM recently completed a benchmarking study of several key modules of the Accelrys Enterprise Platform (AEP) 9.0, using IBM’s iDataPlex and General Parallel File System (GPFS). The results show that the performance of IO intensive workloads, such as Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), can be improved significantly by using GPFS. NGS workloads can also benefit from better load balancing implemented on AEP 9.0. Best practices for scalable IT solutions will also be discussed.