Canadian Museum of History and War Museum Deploy Scale’s HC3 Platform

Scale Computing, Inc., a provider of hyperconverged solutions, announced the implementation of their patented HyperCore Software  HC3 platform to help integrate and simplify the IT infrastructures of the Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian War Museum in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario respectively.

The museums, a Canadian Crown corporation and part of the network of National Museums, were suffering from overly complex and disparate IT environments that caused work stoppage and slowdowns.

Philippe Lemieux, IT director for the museums, said: “We looked for a player in the hyperconverged space that could provide a hypervisor, DR, replication, cloning and everything.  At the end of the day that didn’t leave many players – Scale Computing’s HC3 platform offered the right combination of capabilities to align our infrastructure as well as help us plan, grow and integrate.“

Currently Lemieux says that 85% of museums’ critical systems
are on the HC3 platform including the following:

• Financial
• Human resources
• Box office/Ticketing
• Museum shops
• Facility rentals
• Donor programs
  

The museum’s IT environment included Dell Fiber SANs, Hitachi SANs, HP switches, physical servers and more – infrastructure diversity of equipment, which presented multiple points of failure.

Lemieux and his team looked at many companies to help transform the museum’s in-congruent datacenter. He also wanted one solution to provide replication, snapshotting, user friendliness and the ability to clone the VM and test environment in a single solution.

The HC3 platform fit in with the museums’ needs, offering storage, servers, virtualization and management together in a system – without the virtualization software licenses or external storage to purchase.  As a result, the HC3 lowers out-of-pocket costs and simplifies the infrastructure needed to keep applications running.

Lemieux said migrating to HC3 was a flawless process and challenges were easily rectified.

“We wanted less complexity,” said Lemieux. “We wanted a solution that was dead simple and Scale Computing lived up to the promises of hyper-convergence.“