Imperial War Museum
The Imperial War Museum (IWM) is unique in its coverage of conflicts from the First World War to the present day. It seeks to provide for and to encourage the study and understanding of the history of modern war and ‘war-time experience’.
The Museum spans a huge range of activities not only at its main London location but also at its four additional branches: the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall, the historic ship HMS Belfast, moored in the Pool of London, Imperial War Museum Duxford near Cambridge, and Imperial War Museum North in Trafford.
Business challenge
Following the receipt of a Public Sector Research Exploitation (PSRE) fund grant from the Department of Education, the Imperial War Museum was able to begin digitising its extensive archives of film, photo and audio footage, which would eventually be made available to a wider audience of users and the public.
In order to facilitate the set-up and management of such a system, the IWM needed to install a mass storage system with sufficient capacity to store the digitised material, together with an infrastructure capable of hosting the back-end systems needed to run the Museum’s Digital Assets Management System (DAMS).
Solution
The IWM made the decision to build on the LSI™ ONStor™ NAS Gateway it already had installed, purchasing additional Gateways to provide sufficient capacity to store the newly digitised materials. Two Gateways at its London site were to provide a mass storage system with approximately 80 TBs of capacity, as well as clustering capabilities which allow it to scale capacity and performance by adding new nodes and storage shelves at a significantly lower cost than with traditional NAS solution.
At this time the IWM also installed a tape library to provide a 2-tier system; archival data being stored on tape, and files to be served up to the website or required for high-speed access being stored on the NAS Gateways.
A Storage Area Network (SAN) based on the LSI Engenio® 3994 storage system was also installed in order to provide storage for backend systems on which the Museum’s DAMS now run.
Disaster Recovery (DR) capability was another key requirement to the Museum and with this aim in mind, a duplicate system involving a third LSI ONStor NAS Gateway and an LSI Engenio 3992 storage system with 1 TB drives, was installed at its Duxford site. Remote Volume Mirror (RVM), a feature of LSI’s SANtricity® Storage Manager Software, was also licensed to enable replication of file and block data. This now provides data replication between the two sites via remote mirroring.
While assessing a number of options and vendors, the IWM eventually opted for the LSI ONStor products for a number of reasons. Aside from fitting the Museum’s budget it also had confidence in the hardware to perform the functions required, such as interfacing with the Museum’s DAMS and catalogue software.
Throughout the installation LSI and IWM worked closely with long-term reseller partner, Eurotech, to create the SAN NAS Gateway solution and ensure that the IWM had vital, onsite IT support. “We have been working with Eurotech for over five years and its support in building this resilient SAN NAS Gateway solution has been invaluable,” commented Ian Crawford, Head of ICT, Imperial War Museum. “Eurotech’s onsite support services ensured a smooth transition every step of the way and has been a great benefit to us in our work to maintain Great Britain’s heritage,” he continued.
Results
LSI ONStor systems provide the throughput and capacity required for large-scale, enterprise-wide applications with the ability to scale to 20,000 users and petabytes of capacity. The IWM now has an infrastructure that allows it to store and consolidate its newly digitised historical archives, while enabling easy access and management to its users – both internal and external.
The LSI SAN has enabled all (three) sites to be linked via the JANET network which means that any site can access any or all of the archives at any time. The DAMS will be used as a central repository of the digital assets and once complete, will provide easy access to staff wanting to search and access the archives. The IWM has also been able to deploy existing Dothill and Nexsan storage into the new solution which is a huge investment protection advantage that the LSI ONStor technology offers over traditional NAS solutions.
The museum is now able to use its archives for commercial purposes, generating revenue from the licensing of materials such as film footage to film makers and production companies, and photos to book publishers.
The Museum’s eventual aim is to provide public access to its archive catalogue.
Looking ahead
To date the system has more than coped with demands placed on it, however, in anticipation of the future need for more capacity and wider access requirements, the IWM is currently putting together plans to upgrade the system. This will involve replacing the current NAS Gateways with next generation LSI ONStor 3000 series Gateways, with the aim of future-proofing the system with the increased capacity, bandwidth and network speeds that this will bring.
“The installation of LSI technology at the IWM has completely changed the way we operate in terms of archive storage, access and protection. Our extensive and varied archives are now safe and secure but easily and quickly accessible,” said Ian Crawford, Head of ICT, Imperial War Museum.
