Imperial War Museums Selects Spectra Logic LTO Library

Spectra Logic Corporation announced that its technology has been deployed by IWM (Imperial War Museums) to
provide archiving and DR for its vast collection of digital
assets.

The installation is part of a £3 million project that includes the deployment
of digital scanning equipment, a Collection Management System (CMS), bespoke
Digital Asset Management (DAM) software and a mass storage system to handle the
amounts of digital data generated by the initiative.

In addition to its conventional museum role IWM is also a major
national art gallery, records archive and research centre. Its trustees’
endeavours to collect every type of historical evidence pertaining to conflicts
across the world has seen it build an archive, which includes more
than 15,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures and 30,000 posters; objects
ranging from aircraft, armoured fighting vehicles and naval vessels to
uniforms, badges, personal equipment, and medals and decorations; documents,
both British and foreign; a library of more than 155,000 books; 120 million
feet of cine film and more than 6,500 hours of video tape; more than six
million photographs, and some 32,000 hours of historical sound recordings. In
particular, the project will be used to preserve precious audio and video footage
of Winston Churchill and the Battle of Britain.

Spectra Logic’s T950 tape library has been deployed at IWM Duxford
in the UK, one of the museum’s five sites and Europe’s premier aviation museum.
From this location, the Spectra T950 will be used to archive material as the
museum’s cataloguing and digitalisation efforts gather pace. IWM also creates
around 5TB of new data every year, including information on current operations
received from the Ministry of Defence which will also be housed on the Spectra
T950. The T950 provides 1PB of storage and can expand to deliver more
capacity as needed in the future. It is connected to IWM’s London data centre
sites via Gigabit Ethernet. IWM has set up a mirrored system between the two
sites so data is first written to primary storage in IWM London and then
replicated to IWM Duxford.

"When IWM embarked on
this ambitious project we were aware that our storage requirements would
potentially be huge, making capacity, scalability and cost-effectiveness major
factors in how we architected our mass storage platform," said Ian
Crawford, Head of ICT at the IWM. "We
selected the Spectra Logic T950 as it offers significant capacity up-front,
with an architecture that will allow us to add further silos, drives and tapes
to satisfy our future storage demands. This, allied with the long-term LTO
roadmap, ensures that our investment is future-proofed and our requirements met
at the lowest possible price per GB."

"The shift to digital
content and the need for organisations to protect their archives is one of the
great challenges in the storage industry today," said Molly Rector,
executive vice president of product management and worldwide marketing, Spectra
Logic. "By creating an active
archive system across tape and disk, IWM has not only addressed its needs from
a capacity perspective, but is also able to make its archived assets readily
available, supporting the business’ drive to increase revenue streams through
licensing and reprints."