Kunsthaus Zürich Selects iTernity iCAS FS

The Kunsthaus Zürich selected iTernity iCAS FS to ensure the quality and integrity of artworks as well as their preservation for future generations.

The task of a museum is to collect, preserve, research, exhibit and communicate art. Digitization makes this task more difficult, but at the same time simplifies the work, as new solutions optimize workflows. Protection of digital art for eternity; storage of large files; ensuring data integrity and redundancy while minimizing the overall cost of the solution.

Success at Glance: 

• Securing artworks for future generations with focus on immutability and scalability
• Protecting the data integrity of archived video, photo and image works with the hardware-independent software solution iCAS FS
• Storage of large files with good performance
• Redundancy of data and automatic verification of its integrity

 “Art is a metaphor for the immortal.” In order for this statement by Ernst Fuchs to remain the artist’s wish, but also to become reality on an organizational level, museums must make great efforts. The central task of a museum is the preservation of artworks for future generations – in high quality, unchangeable and secure for the long term.

Progressive Digitization of the Art Business
This task takes on completely new dimensions in a digitized art world. In addition to the conversion and digitization of originally analogue works, the number of born-digital works, such as digital videos and photos, is also increasing. These must also be stored securely and for the long term. The Kunsthaus Zürich faced this challenge.

“With more than 700 video works, the Kunsthaus Zürich has the fourth largest video collection in Switzerland,” reports Kerstin Mürer, director of the restoration department, the Kunsthaus Zürich.

With the extension building, the Kunsthaus is to become Switzerland’s largest art museum by 2020. This means in the same step: more born-digital works and more digitized works, which have to be saved and archived.

IT and Restoration Department under Pressure
Since 1980, the museum has been buying analogue and digital video tapes – currently with file sizes of up to 300GB per video. However, file sizes will increase in the future with full HD and 4K resolutions.

Thomas Rosemann looks back on the step-by-step development: “It is only in the course of time that we have become aware that we not only have to convert and digitize the videos, but also have to protect them on a suitable system for the long term.“

While many other museums use LTO magnetic tapes for this task, the museum realized that a digital and flexible solution should be used.

“At first, we did not know which technical solution would best meet our requirements, and there were some detours and learning effects until we finally came across iTernity,” recalls Rosemann.

“The IT department clearly searched for a solution that integrates well into our standardized IT environment and minimizes the administrative burden on both users and IT. This point combined with the convincing support from iTernity and the flexibility in choosing the hardware provider convinced us as a complete package,” emphasizes Markus Spiri, head of IT, Kunsthaus Zürich.

Accordingly, the requirement profile for the long-term archive was defined: 

• Archiving of large files with a size of 300GB and more
• Backup and automatic monitoring of data integrity
• Redundancy of archive data through mirroring across multiple locations
• Easy handling and performance
• Future security and planning reliability with TCO

The pressure to implement a suitable solution became more and more noticeable, as Kerstin Mürer reports: “In the restoration department we have to act in a timely and proactive manner before the process of decay of the artworks begins or the storage media can no longer be read due to technological change.“

The Archive as a Cornerstone for Process Optimization
“With iCAS FS, we store images and videos of the museum in an audit-proof manner on three different servers,” explains Simon Polomski, a member of the company’s IT department who played a key role in the introduction of the archiving solution. “Two archives have an unlimited retention period, the third runs as a backup replacement with a retention time of five years.“

At the Kunsthaus, many workflows still run manually. This is partly due to the nature of the archive data, as Eléonore Bernard, staff member of the restoration department in the area of media preservation, points out: “It takes a lot of time to deal with the artworks, for example to clarify what the actual work of art is and whether it can be archived in its present form.“

On the other hand, the processes at the Kunsthaus had to be clearly defined. The interfaces of the individual systems (museum database MuseumPlus and ECM Archivematica) also need to be designed.

For the archiving of a work several steps are necessary: the work has to be analyzed and, if necessary, discussed with the artist, the files have to be packed with the metadata and the documentation has to be added to the museum database. With the introduction of iCAS FS as a digital long term archive, the awareness of internal processes at the Kunsthaus Zürich has developed.

IT and the restoration department agree: “The changeover to iCAS FS helped us enormously in optimizing our processes.“

This is not least due to the flexibility of the solution.

Clean IT Infrastructure, Reduced Effort
“iCAS FS is extremely easy to use, the overall system does not require any special IT management and does not require any expensive proprietary hardware,” explains Spiri.

The maintenance of the hardware and software is completely carried out and controlled by iTernity, which reduces the workload for the IT department.

Thanks to replication of the data across different locations, the backup solution via LTO tape storage used to date is no longer necessary. The archive data is synchronized on all servers so that data integrity is permanently guaranteed.

The users from the restoration department are also pleased about the simple handling and the improved performance.

“Only with iCAS FS we are able to safely store our artworks such as videos, photographs and digitized works. None of the evaluated alternative solutions could guarantee comparable flexibility, performance and security,” says Mürer.

It is not without pride that Rosemann adds: “There are currently few other museums in Europe that have such a future-proof and holistic solution in use.“

However, one does not want to rest on ones laurels, the list of planned projects is long.

Outlook Into Future and Automation
On the one hand, further image collections are to be digitized and archived. At the same time, the Kunsthaus wants to further optimize the existing processes.

“We want to automate our workflows more strongly and connect the solutions we use, such as the museum database and the artwork directory, to the long-term archive iCAS FS,” explained Mürer.

The Kunsthaus is looking forward to the implementation in a relaxed manner, because “the cooperation with iTernity was always competent and fast“. Even the trend of increasing data volumes and ever larger files does not worry the museum team thanks to iCAS FS.

With the use of iCAS FS, it relies on a future-proof and holistic archiving solution and thus fulfills the wish of the Swiss aphorist Paul Schibler: “We owe it to every real artist who has created something lasting to protect his work from being forgotten.“

Next Gen Secure Data Retention
iCAS FS is a software-defined scale-out storage platform providing future-proof data retention and compliance (e.g. HIPAA, GDPR) at low TCO. The archive solution helps to comply with legal regulations and internal compliance requirements, thus minimizing business risks. The platform optimizes the long-term storage and protection of large amounts of data from various applications. Benefit from data integrity protection and automatic self-healing.

Simple to Deploy, Easy to Consume
The appliance-like architecture requires a minimal infrastructure footprint: 1 standard Ethernet network and 2 industry standard servers (x86) are needed for a starter configuration. iCAS FS is designed for industry standard hardware and offers integrated monitoring of the whole set-up.

It ensures data integrity and availability over long periods of time: scalable and legally compliant.