Imperial War Museums

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IWM had previously installed a Spectra solution at their Duxford data center, where it reliably preserves their historical content, a total of around 5PB.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 existing Spectra hardware and deployed a complete Spectra Digital Archive, as well as extending the solution to their London data center. Their Spectra Digital Archive solution includes Spectra StorCycle enterprise software for digital preservation, two Spectra BlackPearl Nearline Gateway systems, BlackPearl Object Storage Disk, two BlackPearl NAS systems, and Spectra Tape Libraries. They run five workflows in this environment. First, two copies of master film scans are written to tape, one to each T950 Tape Library on different tape media via BlackPearl Nearline Gateway. Second, audio masters, image masters and access versions are stored on BlackPearl NAS, accessible to end users by way of their digital asset management (DAM) system. Additionally, all of their files are backed up to tape. Their primary backup uses an automated Java CLI script to send data to BlackPearl Nearline Gateway, which writes data to both tape libraries. This data can later be accessed via BlackPearl Eon Browser. A secondary backup with BackupExec sends master film data to a library partition. Finally, StorCycle helps IWM’s audiovisual and exhibitions departments offload primary storage of inactive data outside of their DAM applications. StorCycle identifies media file types older than two years and with more than 1GB in size and moves them automatically to tape via BlackPearl Nearline Gateway. 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.