National Library of Scotland Chooses Scality Ring

The National Library of Scotland is employing Scality RING object storage software to preserve and protect historic and current collections.

One of Scotland’s national cultural collections, the library’s growing repository currently occupies 120 miles of shelving, with thousands of new items being added every single week. Its digitisation initiative makes the collections more accessible to the public, while preserving the important assets.

Accommodating the increasing volumes of digitised data and eliminating labour-intensive tape were two key requirements for the team at the Scottish library. 

“Modernising and streamlining as we move into this period of mass digital growth moved us to simplified object storage, standardised on S3,” said Stuart Lewis, National Library of Scotland’s associate director.

The team chose RING as the foundation of its preservation storage with one copy in each of two on-premises RINGs in their Edinburgh and Glasgow data centres and a third copy in AWS Glacier deep archive.

Ease of management and the ability to scale and limitlessly as they add thousands of items each week, coupled with software licensing that doesn’t penalise them for choosing replication as their resiliency model because Scality licenses software on a data protected model, not total data stored, won them over. Offering modern, resilient S3-compatible storage, the French software firm made the choice easier by providing a bitrot checker for digital preservation monitoring that streamlines the data integrity checking process. 

Things are going so well for them that the National Library of Scotland is looking at additional use cases.

“Scality met all of our requirements and more,” added Lewis. “We’re looking at moving other backups, replacing tape with disk-to-disk backup; moving the non-print collections and even offering it as a service to other organisations, given its multi-tenancy capabilities.“