IWM makes exercise of StorCycle to free skill for all-flash SAN upgrade

Imperial War Museums space to embark on unstructured recordsdata archiving challenge that will archive cool recordsdata to tape and liberate skill for a trip to IntelliFlash all-flash SAN

Antony Adshead

Antony Adshead,
Storage Editor

Published: 24 Mar 2021 15: 00

Imperial War Museums (IWM) is made up our minds to deploy Spectra Good judgment StorCycle to support it archive unstructured recordsdata that comprises spherical 70% of skill on existing space for storing network (SAN) and network-linked storage (NAS) infrastructure.

Releasing up that skill will enable it to retire its seven-year-frequent 3PAR SAN storage infrastructure and replace it with an all-flash system from IntelliFlash.

That every body comes as portion of a circa £100,000 challenge to refresh the server estate with HP Synergy compute, changing that firm’s legacy blade hardware.

IWM began to digitise its media resources spherical four years within the past, with the trip of tens of hundreds of hours of interesting describe photos and hundreds and hundreds of photos to a brand original digital asset management (DAM) system archive essentially based utterly on two Spectra Good judgment tape libraries (LTO-7 and TS1150) with a Shaded Pearl LTFS-essentially based utterly object storage and NAS entrance cease.

IWM has five internet sites right by the UK – IWM London, IWM North, IWM Duxford, the Churchill War Rooms and HMS Belfast – and is residence to roughly 750,000 digital resources, representing a total of 1.5PB (petabytes) of recordsdata as uncompressed recordsdata.

Contemporary scans within the museum’s movie collection generate an additional 10TB (terabytes) of recordsdata per month, with its videotape scanning challenge anticipated to create more than 900TB of recordsdata over the next four years.

The original StorCycle-essentially based utterly infrastructure will offload unstructured recordsdata from the 200TB hybrid flash 3PAR SAN and an estate of (largely siloed) Synology NAS containers with spherical 1PB of skill.

CIO Ian Crawford talked about: “DAM is successfully tucked away. Right here’s about recordsdata coming in from, let’s relate, bodycam photos from the Ministry of Defence, recordsdata we create ourselves from media materials, museum tasks, and so forth.”

“We at all times had an field going by tons of unstructured recordsdata. It’s now not out of management, but it’s lots to management. Folks don’t housekeep and are searching for to take care of recordsdata on drives perpetually. We’re generating tons of recordsdata that we don’t are searching for to head into DAM.”

“StorCycle will enable us to closely lower the volume of recordsdata we now need to trip from one storage platform to the many when we deploy IntelliFlash. We hope to offload about 70% to tape.”

StorCycle has most attention-grabbing just correct been deployed, with the first recordsdata anticipated to be processed by it this week.

The mountainous advantages for Crawford are in simplifying the infrastructure and the cost savings that will end result.

“Clearly, if we will have the chance to head and buy a brand original SAN and we’d like 70% much less storage, that’s a huge saving. What we’ve just correct bought is a lot much less costly than the 3PAR SAN we bought seven years within the past. Also, tape is low worth when it comes to vitality consumption.”

Your total challenge has been delayed by the difficulties of getting workers on-region in consequence of of Covid restrictions, but it is miles hoped the IntelliFlash and Synergy recede-live would possibly well even be applied in time for the gap of original World War Two and Holocaust galleries at IWM’s indispensable London region in September.

StorCycle runs on a Windows server and crawls storage for recordsdata that matches characteristics space by user protection and migrates it off to assorted tiers of storage, in IWM’s case to a brand original Spectra Good judgment Shaded Pearl tape infrastructure – on a T120 tape library – and separated out from DAM.

Data would possibly well even be scanned to a unfold of schedules and criteria, corresponding to size or last-active, and be moved or copied off to the majority storage layer in a single-off or habitual operations. From here, they are visible as HTML hyperlinks to users.

When users are searching for to revive, they are supplied with knowledge on how lengthy this would possibly well hold – on condition that recordsdata also can merely be on tape or cloud – and brought by a local of suggestions, including the flexibility to revive associated challenge recordsdata.

Spectra plans to enable migrated recordsdata to be represented as symbolic hyperlinks, but that will device in a later originate over the next year.

Rather than symbolic hyperlinks, assorted objects on the roadmap encompass clustering of StorCycle hardware nodes, the addition of S3 compatibility, the flexibility to saunter within the cloud, and Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure as targets, even supposing all these are some time away.

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