Australia Art Museum Works With EMC

EMC Corporation announced that the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia‘s only museum dedicated to modern art, has been working with EMC to digitize its collections as well as audio and video interviews with leading artists to make these and other information assets more easily and cost-efficiently accessible to arts communities, scholars, students and the general public in Australia and worldwide.

The MCA, which overlooks Sydney harbor, is consolidating all of its storage on an EMC Celerra network-attached storage (NAS) system. MCA applications stored on Celerra include exhibit design, digital asset library, catalog design studio, Microsoft Exchange email, finance, fundraising and data backup.

Euan Upston, the MCA’s Deputy Director, said: "Online access to our art has enabled a completely new and more efficient way of collaborating at the museum. Our museum curator used to plan exhibits with artists using paper and pencil. Now, the artist and curator pull works from our digital asset library and arrange them on ‘virtual walls.’ If two works displayed next to one another appear too close or visually clash, it’s simply a click of the button to move them to different locations."

In a project known as ‘MCA Artist’s Voice,’ the MCA stores audio and video interviews with exhibiting artists on EMC Celerra unified storage. The full interviews are available in DVD format and interview clips can be accessed via MCA’s Web site. In 2007, a U.S. school won a Fulbright scholarship for a report on an Australian artist using material from Artist’s Voice.

"In the last nine years, we’ve gone from 98,000 visitors annually to more than half a million," said Upston. "To ensure our visitors continue to have fresh art experiences, we’ve expanded our collections and resources, which have increased the amount of digitized visual and audio material as well as administrative data for us to store and manage. EMC Celerra’s performance and expandability have enabled our information infrastructure to not only keep up with our expansion, but also facilitate new offerings, such as Web access to high-resolution images. We are now planning for real-time video conferences with artists worldwide and will record and store these interactions on Celerra for long-term access. This is all part of the MCA’s drive to develop and refurbish the MCA, a drive which has at its centre the creation of a ‘National Centre for Creative Learning.’ To achieve this, we need the performance, growth capacity and reliability of the NAS system."

By consolidating storage that resided on individual servers onto Celerra, the MCA was able to reduce the number of servers from twelve to four.

Upston said: "As a non-profit, we have limited funds for administrative and support systems. With server consolidation, EMC Celerra allowed us to reduce both our server acquisition and operational costs. We’re also using less power, which is an additional savings and good for our carbon footprint."

Prior to implementing Celerra, the MCA would back up data daily to tape. Not only did the tapes fail occasionally, but files were often lost due to server failures or misplaced DVDs, which staff would sometimes use to store digital images. Now, the MCA backs up its files and other information stored on Celerra to a separate virtual disk within the Celerra.

"Now that we have all of our data consolidated onto the Celerra, it is much easier and faster to find the information our staff needs on a daily basis," said Upston. "When users accidentally delete files, we can restore and return them in 10 minutes. Before, it would take two days to find the tape with the appropriate file and restore it. Celerra also has been exceptionally reliable, so we no longer have to battle with unexpected downtime."

Upston said: "Faster, easier and more reliable access to our information is a huge benefit to the museum’s productivity. There is much more flexibility and confidence to play around with ideas and collaborate, which are essential to delivering positive, creative outcomes. It has allowed faster delivery of education products such as ‘Sketch’, an exhibition activity sheet which is developed by our Education Department in association with the relevant artists that leads students through the exhibitions and help increase the understanding of the art they encounter. We’re also developing several new services to reach our virtual visitors. All of these initiatives rely on flexible and highly available access to our information. So working with EMC and NEXUS, our IT management company is a vital partnership in the delivery of these goals."

EMC and Nexus Network worked together to deliver this solution to the MCA. Nexus Network, a boutique technology company based in Sydney, Australia, works with customers to create and maintain a connection between a business and its information.