National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum Relies on Asigra and CoreVault

Asigra Inc. announced that CoreVault, an online data backup and recovery company specializing in the protection of business-critical data, is using Asigra to protect the increasing volume of museum records and archive images for the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. CoreVault relies on the Asigra software platform for this world-recognized museum of the West because it is a cloud backup and recovery platform optimized for simple yet powerful data protection that significantly reduces hardware resources and overhead burden required by alternative backup and recovery solutions.

The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City is America’s premier institution of Western history, art and culture. Founded in 1955, the nonprofit Museum collects, preserves and exhibits an internationally renowned collection of Western art and artifacts, while sponsoring dynamic educational programs and groundbreaking scholarly research to stimulate interest in the enduring legacy of the American West. More than 10 million visitors from around the world have sought out this unique museum to gain better understanding of the West: a region and a history that permeates U.S. culture.

Since its opening more than half a century ago, the museum has collected an expansive inventory of collections, more than 158,000 archive images, and 355,000 records, detailed membership information and library catalogs. Protection of this data, in addition to normal business data including financial records, spreadsheets, correspondence and calendars, is essential to daily operations. The museum’s previous tape backup process had become increasingly cumbersome and unreliable. Tape backups were scheduled daily, but maintaining these backups easily consumed the small IT department’s valuable time. After looking at the cost of materials, loss of productivity and the impact to operations due to the slow response of the system, the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum knew a better solution was required.

“When we initially started looking for partners, we looked at CoreVault,” said Susan Adams, Assistant Director of Development for Corporations and Foundations for the museum. “They presented us with a solution that would enable the elimination of tape backup. After touring CoreVault’s state-of-the-art facility and learning more about Asigra, we were certain that our data would be secure in the hands of experts. We have now protected more than a terabyte of information and are increasing that by gigabytes on a monthly basis. The data protection CoreVault and Asigra provide is critical.”

The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum has benefitted significantly from the three-tier storage architecture managed by CoreVault and powered by Asigra. CoreVault has implemented a customized strategy for the museum that enables them to utilize three tiers of storage to protect and manage museum data. Based on file type and access requirements, data moves automatically and efficiently from the Online Tier to the Nearline Tier and then eventually to the Offline Tier, reducing the overall cost of data protection.

Key benefits of the Asigra software solution for the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum include:

• Agentless architecture that fully protects all information assets with minimal investment, technology overhead and management;
• Scheduled automatic backups that ensure continuous protection;
• Easy, manageable and on demand information recovery;
• Delta processing, compression and de-duplication to significantly reduce network bandwidth requirements and storage costs;
• Enterprise-class fault tolerant capabilities for business continuity;
• Advanced encryption for data in-flight and at-rest delivers complete asset protection, and
• Leading OS, server, database, email system and storage environment support.

“Asigra’s powerful backup and recovery software platform has enabled us to shatter the limitations of traditional distributed backup software solutions and offer our customers significantly more value,” says Jim Rutherford, President of CoreVault. “With grid-based performance and dynamic capacity scaling for virtually unlimited data growth, the technology enables us to do more for our customers while minimizing operational and management costs. For the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum it is exactly the solution required to protect their impressive records of Western culture.”