CASE STUDY
Imperial War Museums
Imperial War Museums digitally preserve the history of modern war indefinitely with Spectra Digital Archive
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Spectra StorCycle
Overview
IWM (Imperial War Museums) tells the story of people who have lived, fought and died in conflicts involving Britain and the Commonwealth since the First World War. IWM’s five branches attract over 2.5 million visitors each year and house a collection of over 10 million objects. The branches are IWM London, IWM North, the world renowned aviation museum IWM Duxford, Churchill War Rooms and the Second World War cruiser HMS Belfast.
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. Spectra met all of our requirements and then some, and now continues to deliver with its Spectra Digital Archive solution.
— Ian Crawford, Chief Information Officer, Imperial War Museums
The Challenge
IWM is home to hundreds of thousands of films, videotapes, audio recordings and photographs that must be preserved forever but won’t last on their original media. They currently store an archive of around 750,000 digital assets, which amass a total of 1.5PB as uncompressed files. Their digital asset collection includes 5,000 film and video scan masters, 100,000 audio masters dating back to the 1930s, nearly 500,00 image masters and thousands of lower resolution versions (access versions for commercial and web use) of the above assets. New scans in their film collection generate an additional 10TB of data per month, and the videotape scanning project is expected to create another 900TB over four years.
The Solution
A long-time Spectra Logic customer, IWM had previously installed a Spectra solution at their Duxford data center, where it reliably preserves their historical content, a total of around 5PB. IWM decided to leverage their investment in the Spectra hardware that was in place and deployed a full Spectra Digital Archive (SDA). Their complete SDA solution consists of Spectra StorCycle, an enterprise software for digital preservation that scans and moves data to a Perpetual Tier of storage, a Spectra BlackPearl Platform and two Spectra T950 Tape Libraries, one with LTO-7 tape media and drives, and one with IBM® TS1150 tape media and drives. The complete Spectra Digital Archive offers IWM the capacity, reliability and product longevity they sought for an extremely affordable price, and is backed by Spectra’s efficient, award-winning support services.
Environment Snapshot
- Spectra StorCycle® Enterprise Software for Digital Preservation
- Spectra BlackPearl® Hybrid Storage Platform
- BlackPearl® Eon Browser
- Spectra® T950 with LTO-7 tape drives
- Spectra® T950 with IBM® TS1150 tape drives
- Veritas BackupExec
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