NATIONAL COWBOY & WESTERN HERITAGE MUSEUM ENJOYS UNIQUE RELATIONSHIP WITH COREVAULT
The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City is America's premier institution of Western history, art and culture. It is also one of CoreVault's premier clients.
Founded in 1955, the non-profit museum in Oklahoma City collects preserves and exhibits an internationally renowned collection of Western art and artifacts, while sponsoring dynamic educational programs and groundbreaking scholarly research to stimulate interest in the enduring legacy of our American West. More than 10 million visitors from around the world have sought out this unique museum to gain better understanding of the West: a region and history that permeates our national culture.
THE BUSINESS
The non-profit museum shares the same business operations concerns as for-profit entities, according to Susan Adams, Assistant Director of Development for Corporations and Foundations. "We backup an enormous amount of data which includes normal buiness functions such as financial records, spreadsheets, correspondence and calendars. However, we also have some unique documents, such as inventory of our collections, over 100,000 archives images, membership information and library catalogs."
THE CHALLENGE
According to IT Director, Sharon Kasper, it became evident that the museum's increasing number of documents required more reliable backup. The sheer volume of data moving through the museum's network had presented an enourmous concern from the perspective of data protection. "One server dedicated to our research center contains more than 35,000 records," said Sharon. Another server contains a database of more than 320,000 records. "We'd be devastated if we didn't have the data available to us at all times," she said.
The museum's previous method of tape back-up and "offsite storage" (Sharon's home) proved to be costly, cumbersome, and unreliable. "Tape back-ups were scheduled daily on our servers," said Sharon, "but maintaining these back-ups easily consumed our IT department's valuable time." Susan concurred. "When we looked at the cost of materials, loss of productivity, and the impact to operations due to the slow response of the system, we knew a better solution was required," she said. Constant troubleshooting and tapes aborting presented further headaches.
THE SOLUTION
"Because of the stature of this national organization, with visitors from over 50 coutries in our facility on any given day, the museum needed a back-up and retention system that was commensurate with the scope of our institution," Susan said. "When we initially started looking for partners, we looked at CoreVault. The presented solutions that would enable us to eliminate tape back-up and take advantage of the technology they offered," she said. "After touring CoreVault's state-of-the-art facility, we were certain that our data would be secure and in the hands of experts," she said.
CoreVault's facility is equipped with battery back-ups, generators, 24-7 monitoring, and climate controlled data centers, important to an organization that understands the importance and complexities of a controlled climate for priceless art collections and archives. The data redundancy provided by CoreVault, at a facility 120 miles from Oklahoma City, adds increased confidence and security of data.
A UNIQUE RELATIONSHIP
The museum and CoreVault enjoy a mutually respected ongoing partnership. The museum is a very important client for CoreVault, as well as one of its larger back-up clients, due to the large volume of images from archives and publications that flow through the T-1 bandwidth on a daily basis. Despite the relatively small bandwidth, CoreVault is able to perform their large daily backups in the allotted time every night.
The museum was initially backing up their Novell GroupWise e-mails prior to converting to MS Exchange. However, CoreVault's robust support of operating systems, databases and applications allowed the museum to enjoy a seamless transition whenever the conversion took place. Their large volume of e-mails makes the museum a very large Exchange 2007 client. They also utilize some of CoreVault's rich features like automated retention schemes, and message level retrieval (MLR). As well as protecting their e-mail, CoreVault protects a vast array of different data. In doing so, CoreVault has implemented a customized strategy for dealing with them utilizing all three tiers of storage to protect and manage the museum's data. Based on file type and access data, data moves automatically and efficiently from the Online Tier to the Nearline Tier, and then eventually onto the Offline Tier.
The relationship is so positive; the museum has been a beta-testing site for CoreVault on numerous occasions, a testament to a great business relationship.
RESULTS
"Our facility holds an incredible amount of valuable historical documents," said Sharon. "It was important that we chose a service provider we could trust. We have positive experiences with the people at CoreVault, and they provide a great service for us," she said. "they anticipate situations and take steps to resolve them before they translate into anything that is noticable to our operations. In my experience, that's what provides superior delivery and service to a customer," she said.
"Some organizations make it a point to tell you about their customer service and how good it is. With CoreVault, it is simply evident."
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