Sydney's The Mint museum
Counterparts Technology has overhauled Sydney Living Museums’ IT systems with solutions from Veeam Software and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
The combination of Veeam Software’s cloud solution through the Veeam Availability Suite and HPE's storage infrastructure were provided by Counterparts Technology in order to address issues with SLM’s systems, which is responsible for managing 12 historic houses, gardens and museums in Sydney.
As a result of the work, SLM has noted significant improvements with its data management.
Examples of some of the improvements provided by SLM include restoring a server back-up in under 30 minutes, establishing disaster recovery solutions for all systems, and increasing the speed of front-of-house transactions, alleviating the frustrations of visitors.
Commenting on the project, Matt Wyn-Jones, managing director at Counterparts Technology, said there was a large amount of content that had to be managed, so decided to work closely with the team at SLM throughout the integration process.
“We wanted to help provide them with the right platforms to manage this and meet the ever-changing demands their growing archives required,” said Wynn-Jones.
“We proposed a Veeam solution due to its ability to provide reliable, near line backups of all their critical data with minimal performance impact. This has led to a massive reduction in business disruption and relieved the stress on production servers.”
The overhaul was needed as Lisa Brady, head of ICT at Sydney Living Museums, said that SLM was outgrowing its existing technology, particularly for the management of the digital archives.
“We needed to find a solution that kept up with our growing database and helped us provide the access to collections this organisation is committed to,” said Brady.
“When people visited any of our heritage sites, admission would take a long time to process and our visitors would get frustrated, dampening their whole experience.
“A lot of the access to digital collections that we use to build resources and materials were hampered by poor system performance. Our curators were frustrated and the organisation’s full potential was not being realised because our technology wasn’t there.”
Brady said it was clear to her that these issues need to be solved in order to efficiently present historical and cultural data, as there was a real risk of a negative impact on revenue, process controls and visitor experience.
