Imperial War Museums in UK Integrating Spectra StorCycle Software

Spectra Logic Corporation announced that Imperial War Museums (IWM) deployed StorCycle Storage Lifecycle Management Software to enhance its existing storage infrastructure.

IWM storage infrastructure supports audio-visual and exhibitions departments to preserve invaluable data, including thousands of films, videotapes, audio recordings and photographs that would otherwise disintegrate and be lost forever were they not digitised.

StorCycle software is being used to manage an amount of unstructured data that resides on expensive SAN and NAS storage outside of IWM’s existing DAMS (digital asset management system) platform.

IWM has five sites across the UK, IWM London, IWM North, IWM Duxford, Churchill War Rooms and HMS Belfast, and is home to approximately 750,000 digital assets, representing a total of 1.5PB of data as uncompressed files. This volume is growing, with new scans in the museums’ film collection generating an additional 10TB of data per month, and its videotape scanning project expected to create more than 900TB of data over the next 4 years.

A Spectra customer since 2009, IWM has implemented a large-scale data archiving solution to reliably preserve and manage its substantial digital archive pertaining to UK and Commonwealth wartime history. IWM’s current archive infrastructure consists of 2 Spectra T950 Tape Libraries, one with LTO-7 tape media and drives, and one with IBM TS1150 tape media and drives, along with a Spectra BlackPearl Converged Storage System, BlackPearl Object Storage Disk and BlackPearl NAS solution.

IWM is on track to realise long-term cost savings by deploying StorCycle Storage Lifecycle Management Software to optimise their primary storage capacity through the offloading of inactive data to the museums’ archive infrastructure. StorCycle identifies and moves inactive data to a perpetual tier of storage, consisting of object storage disk and tape. It scans the IWM departments’ primary storage for media file types older than 2 years and larger than 1GB, and automatically moves them to the IWM archive, maximising capacity on the primary storage system.

“When we set out on our search to find a storage solution capable of preserving Imperial War Museums’ substantial digital archive, there were specific criteria on which we were not willing to compromise,” explained Ian Crawford, CIO, IWM. “Spectra met all of our requirements and then some, and now continues to deliver with StorCycle’s storage lifecycle management capabilities.“

Rob Tyler, IT infrastructure manager (DAMS), IWM, said: “Spectra’s StorCycle storage lifecycle management software has empowered us to move our data into reliable, long-term storage, offloading our primary storage and preserving media files and unstructured data – all with the push of a button.“

Craig Bungay, VP of EMEA sales, Spectra Logic, added: “IWM preserves invaluable historical data and it is vital that their storage infrastructure be failsafe and reliable in addition to providing flexibility and affordability. This is achieved by storing multiple copies of the museums’ data on different media, and by automatically offloading inactive data from expensive primary storage to its archive solution using StorCycle.“

StorCycle is a storage lifecycle management software solution that ensures data is stored on the right tier throughout its lifecycle for greater IT and budgetary efficiencies. It scans primary storage for inactive files and migrates them to a lower cost tier of storage, which includes any combination of cloud storage, object storage disk, NAS and object storage tape. Interoperable with Linux and Windows, it migrates data, without changing original formats, and allows users to have access to all data including data migrated to higher latency storage mediums like cloud “cold” tiers and tape. It includes an open RESTful API that allows users to integrate the software into a broader set of workflows, as well as migrate data to disk, tape and all tiers of Amazon and Azure.

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