Imperial War Museum deploys archiving and disaster recovery solution

The Imperial War Museum (IWM) has deployed archiving and disaster recovery technology from tape backup specialist Spectra Logic to protect its digital assets.

The project is part of a £3m programme, which 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 large volumes of digital data generated by the initiative.

A Spectra Logic tape library has been deployed at the IWM's site in Duxford, which will be used to archive material as part of the museum's cataloguing and digitisation project.

"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.

He added that IWM's choice of product and vendor was influenced by both future scalability and price.

"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 roadmap, ensures that our investment is future-proofed and our requirements met at the lowest possible price per GB."

The solution provides 1 petabyte of storage currently, and can expand to deliver more capacity in the future. It is connected to IWM's London datacentre 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.