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Imperial War Museum (IWM) is actually a family of five museums: IWM London; IWM North in Trafford, Greater Manchester; IWM Duxford near Cambridge; the Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall, London; and the historic ship HMS Belfast, moored on the Thames. IWM is unique in its coverage of conflicts, especially those involving Britain and the Commonwealth, from the First World War to the present day. They seek to provide for, and to encourage, the study and understanding of the history of modern war and 'wartime experience' and are proud to be regarded as essential sights of London, Cambridgeshire and Greater Manchester.

The museum used SANs already for the bulk of the storage and main backups; however another brand of NAS was used many years ago before the first Synology device was purchased for scanning and archiving projects. That NAS had become out of date, unstable and therefore unreliable. Software updates and technical support were no longer offered by the manufacturer for these particular models, causing concern and trust issues.

Research was carried out into what NAS brands were available in the market and it seemed that Synology was the best priced, had an intuitive user interface, and was more than capable of handling the museum's requirements. IWM started out with an RS407 and have expanded the fleet from there in recent years. Currently they have 13 Synology NAS units setup across 4 locations (Manchester, Duxford and two London locations) which include a mix of RackStations and DiskStations. These models are used for activities including storing departmental data, main backup destinations, archive storage which includes photos and videos, scanned documents and offsite backups. Rob Tyler, IT DAMS manager at IWM, says "Synology provides us with a reliable storage solution at a very reasonable price."

STABLE AND RELIABLE
The reliability and stability of Synology's hardware and software was clear from the research conducted before purchasing. The museum's IT facilities use several Synology NAS models (of different capacities), manufactured over a number of years, illustrating the endurance that Synology NAS can withstand. Rob Tyler has ensured all the models have been updated to the latest possible DSM (DiskStation Manager) operating system and continues to maintain a healthy work system by updating all hotfixes when released, closing any gaps on security concerns. At first, the NAS' were set up using Desktop designed HDD's however after some advice from the UK Technical Support team, enterprise disks were purchased for use in the large DS and RackStation units and NAS specific HDDs for the smaller units. This has created a steadier IT environment.

A DIRECT INFLUENCE
As the years went on, a need for greater volume capacity arose and so in 2014 the Imperial War Museum got in touch directly with Synology UK to discuss future possibilities of supporting larger volumes. There was one particular IWM archive of 200TB which could not be split due to software limitations on the previous storage product used, and so IWM made a feature request to Synology that a 200TB volume be created for Synology NAS.

In September 2014, after numerous meetings and rigorous software and hardware testing, the Synology development team in Taiwan were able to grant this feature request in the DSM 5.1 release. This then resulted in the purchase of further RS10613xs+ units for IWM.

"Not many NAS devices support what we need," concludes Rob Tyler. "Having the option and flexibility to be able to contact Synology with feature requests, knowing that they will be read, researched with a strong chance they will be put into production is fantastic and reassuring."
More info: www.synology.com