Spectra Logic's IWM Scoops 2022 IBC Innovation Award

Spectra Logic has announced that its customer Imperial War Museums (IWM), has won the 2022 IBC Innovation Award in 'Content Distribution' for a prodigious project working with Spectra Logic and technology partners on the design of a digital asset management and storage ecosystem with multi-site implementation across data centres in Cambridge and London.

With the aim of excellence in digital preservation, this IWM project enables generations to explore more than one million items amassed since 1917 in IWM’s five branches. The 2022 IBC Innovation Awards celebrate the spirit of collaboration within the content and technology industry, recognising the best new ways to manage content and connect creators and consumers, or creators and their collaborators.

The IWM project's data management and storage architecture brings together software and hardware from multiple vendors including Spectra Logic, Axiell and Veritas to enable IWM to collect and preserve real stories of modern war, conflicts and their impact. The result is a genetically diverse, geographically dispersed storage ecosystem that provides IWM with the technology to safeguard the collections that fuel its invaluable programs, immersive exhibitions, historical filmmaking, research and learning programmes.

Ian Crawford, chief information officer at Imperial War Museums, said: "We have around 1.5 petabytes of unique data, but with multiple copies to keep this data safe, we actually store nearly five petabytes. When we set out on our search to find a storage solution capable of preserving Imperial War Museums' substantial digital archive, they met all of our requirements and then some."

With the challenge of reliably preserving a collection of over one million digital assets, IWM was driven to establish a digital archive that exemplifies best practices in long-term storage and digital preservation. Their storage ecosystem includes Spectra T950 Tape Libraries; Spectra BlackPearl® NAS with high-density drive capability allowing for expansion; Spectra’s BlackPearl object storage platform, providing migration capability between tape generations, and Spectra StorCycle® software, enabling data migration from primary storage, saving IWM storage capacity and money.

The final project provides IWM with a digital archive that boasts reliability, scalability, effortless data migration, cost-effectiveness and longevity to help them store this data forever.

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