Imperial War Museum deploys SpectraLogic tape archive systems with LTFS Black Pearl in digitisation project for 21,000 hours of film and millions of images and voice recordings.
The Imperial War Museum has deployed a tape archive comprising SpectraLogic tape libraries plus disk storage with a Black Pearl object storage/ linear tape file system (LTFS) front end as an archive to hold around half a petabyte of digitised media.
The move has allowed it to replace diverse, ageing and difficult to manage disk storage systems that included Nexsan Satabeast arrays.
The museum is in the process of digitising audio, video and photographic holdings, and has around 21,000 hours of film, one million still images, plus audio interviews and also acts as the archive for the Ministry of Defence.
As film is digitised it is first captured as a digital picture exchange (DPX) file – effectively a series of tag image file format (TIFF) images – and these are archived. Simultaneously, the movie is transcoded into MPEG, Flash etc for use by researchers, on IWM websites and the like.
