January 2015 | The BROAD Museum Data Protection Solution | page 1

OneBlox, thanks to its inline deduplication, is an excellent Veeam disk-based target. By simply adding additional OneBlox Im able to support my growing infrastructure without reconfiguring my backups.

- Heather Hart, Director of IT, The Broad Museum

Business Challenges

Building a new storage and disaster recovery infrastructure to support dynamic business growth

Building a storage infrastructure to protect extremely valuable digital assets in perpetuity

Creating an enterprise-class infrastructure with a cost-constrained IT budget

Introduction

Building a new IT infrastructure for a newly born museum presents many challenges. Initially, keeping the infrastructure simple is often a best practice, yet over time, it must scale and support dynamic business needs. The Broad Museum is acutely aware of this and is focusing on solid, next generation solutions that can start small, are feature rich, and poses the ability to scale as necessary.

The Broad Museum is a new contemporary art museum under construction in downtown Los Angeles set to open in the fall of 2015. The galleries will be showcasing nearly 2,000 art pieces in The Broad Art Foundation and the Broads personal collections, which are among the most prominent holdings of postwar and contemporary art worldwide. With two gallery floors and a 24,000-square-foot public plaza the new 120,000-square-foot building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, will also be the new headquarters of The Broad Art Foundations worldwide lending library.

The Broad Museum has unique requirements, such as infinite data retention. Heather Hart, Director of IT, and a team of 20 people, are building a new modern IT infrastructure which must be focused and easily operated. However, with an expectation of 500,000 visitors per year, things will change dramatically in the near future and she is prepared to face the upcoming business challenges.

Exablox was selected by The Broad for its characteristics of simplicity and manageability. Examining the unpredictable near-term data growth, its elegant scale-out architecture enables new and efficient data protection schemes with remote replication to protect more data safely. For the Broad, a critical characteristic of Exablox is that data is protected against multiple failures without having the complexity of traditional RAID systems.

Customer Success Story

The Broad Museum Protects Its Future The Broad Museum Creates a Storage Infrastructure for the Unpredictable Future

January 2015 | The BROAD Museum Data Protection Solution | page 2

Legacy storage, based on scale-up architectures, are usually complicated and their ability to scale is too unpredictable to support our dynamic Veeam infrastructure.

- Heather Hart, Director of IT, The Broad Museum

Business Challenges

Facing the unknown is always difficult, especially when you have a limited number of resources at your disposal. The Broad needed a storage solution that could satisfy its initial Veeam storage requirements, but in the near-term easily expand to protect more information assets according to the organizations needs. Furthermore, with a lean IT Organization, other requirements like ease of management, for example, were on the top of her list.

Supporting a museums infrastructure is very different from other organizations. All information has to be safely stored and protected. Forever. Hardware longevity, secure data protection schemes, and remote replication are fundamental requirements. In fact, The Broad is swapping data center colocation space with another museum enabling the two museums to share floor space while maintaining remote copies of the information for disaster recovery.

The Broad also wanted to simplify, improve, and consolidate backup operations. In the past, external hard drives were used for backups and manually rotated off-site, a time-demanding and risky activity. Initially, external cloud backup services were considered, but quickly dismissed as being too costly, especially with the forecasted data growth. In fact, while the first priority is protecting VMware virtual machines, leveraging Veeam backup software, the storage solution must be ready to support the expanded virtualization infrastructure that will be implemented before The Broads opening.

A legacy storage solution, based on dual-controller arrays, is usually complicated, hard to manage, and are unable to granularly scale. This forces an organization to initially drastically over provision storage resources based on a multi-year capacity forecast, or experience a forklift upgrade when the incorrect storage model is initially selected. The Broad needed a scaleable solution that was not only a deduplication target for Veeam, but also could serve as the storage solution for future virtualization storage requirements.

The Solution OneBlox, with its scale-out object-based architecture, is the perfect fit for The Broad. OneBlox, with its inline deduplication capabilities, is the perfect backup/recovery target. Additionally, the ability to efficiently remotely replicate the backups to another location solves the critical disaster recovery requirements of the museum.

OneSystem, Exabloxs cloud-based management system, includes ongoing proactive monitoring and reporting and avoids a local console installation while enabling remote connectivity from any modern web browser without needing a remote desktop or VPN connections. This means that it is possible to provision and control storage resources easily even as Heather is off-site. Additionally, Exablox support continually monitors the OneBlox infrastructure at The Broad and proactively identifies potential problems, often before they arise.

Exabloxs data protection scheme, which differs from traditional RAID systems by making multiple copies of each single stored object, is much more resilient and efficient with data automatically distributed as a function of the available cluster resources at any single moment. And, last but not least, having the advantage to install off-the-shelf commodity disk drives, reduces the total cost of ownership and prolongs system lifetime at a minimum cost. Moreover, OneBlox can incrementally scale by adding a few disk drives and can leverage the latest disk drive models available on the market. Alternatively, OneBlox can incrementally scale by adding addition OneBloxboth methods require zero-configuration and zero-downtime.

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Realized Benefits

Providing an enterprise-class disk-based backup/recovery and disaster recovery storage infrastructure

Providing enterprise storage capabilities in an easy to manage solution

A future-proof solution for dynamic, and unpredictable, application and scalability requirements

We have been focused on building a modern infrastructure that can support our expected phenomenal growth.

- Heather Hart, Director of IT, The Broad Museum

The Benefits

Exablox has helped The Broad begin with a cost effective and focused storage solution that seamlessly integrates with Veeam. OneBlox enables The Broad to easily expand and increase the storage capacity, as needs change, at a low predictable price.

The Broad has implemented a storage solution with a scale-out, next generation object-based architecture leveraging advanced data protection techniques and deduplication. The balance between efficiency and improved overall availability has been superior to traditional scale-up arrays.

Multiprotocol support (NFS and SMB) enables The Broad to enjoy freedom of choice about the hypervisor for the virtualized infrastructure and to serve files to different types of clients at the same time. With a multi-protocol scale-out architecture OneBlox can easily be leveraged for additional application requirements beyond Veeam and data protection.

Longevity of the storage solution is afforded to The Broad by its design. OneBlox supports the latest commodity hard drives on the market, and can seamlessly scale to hundreds of TBs without requiring a fork-lift upgrade, reconfiguring applications, or downtime.

Conclusion

The Broad Museum was looking for something unique: an enterprise class storage solution without the complexity or excessive cost. It required a storage infrastructure that would grow with its dynamic business, protect its information, integrate with Veeam, and provide the flexibility to be used by other applications, as the business needs changed. OneBlox and OneSystem have proven to be able to satisfy these requirements. With its innovative and enterprise features, Exablox is one of critical building blocks of The Broad IT infrastructure.

Company

The Broad Museum is being built in downtown Los Angeles and is set to be launch in the fall of 2015 with a goal of 500,000 visitors per year.

thebroad.org