ST May-Jun 2021

CASE STUDY:
CASE STUDY: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS
PRESERVING PRICELESS MEMORIES OF
GLOBAL CONFLICTS
LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE SCANS AND MOVES INACTIVE DATA FROM PRIMARY STORAGE TO
'PERPETUAL TIER' FOR LONG-TERM ACCESS AND ARCHIVAL
Spectra Logic has announced that
Imperial War Museums (IWM)
deployed Spectra StorCycle Storage
Lifecycle Management Software to
enhance the Museums' existing storage
infrastructure, which supports its audiovisual
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 a large amount
of unstructured data that resides on
expensive SAN and NAS storage outside
of IWM's existing DAMS (digital asset
management system) platform.
EVER-GROWING COLLECTION
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.
Its five branches attract over 2.5 million
visitors each year and house a collection
of over 10 million objects. The five sites
across the UK - IWM London, IWM
North, IWM Duxford, Churchill War
Rooms and HMS Belfast - are home to
approximately 750,000 digital assets,
representing a total of 1.5PB of data 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. This
volume is constantly 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 four years.
A Spectra customer since 2009, IWM has
implemented a large-scale data archiving
18 STORAGE May/June 2021
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