“The solution has yielded performance improvements, cost savings, and management integration with the rest of our technology infrastructure. In turn, it has allowed us to improve process documentation as well as specific aspects of our activity.”

Fernando Camps
Chief of Information Technology Services, National Library of Spain

National Library of Spain preserves a growing collection of priceless works with Scality

Hardware-independent solution provides versatility, security, integrity and easy capacity expansion

Open to the public since 1712, the National Library of Spain (NLS) has amassed a priceless and irreplaceable collection of books, incunables, manuscripts, prints, drawings, photographs, sound recordings, and musical scores.

In 2008 the library launched an ambitious program of catalog digitization, making more than 10,000 works electronically available. Since that time, the institution’s digital collections have continued to grow exponentially. Now the goal is to digitally preserve the whole of Spanish cultural heritage and make it available to citizens, researchers and other entities that collaborate with NLS.

The Challenge

Increasing investments in ICT became necessary to securely store and manage this enormous and ever-growing volume of information. The data resided in proprietary data storage systems subject to model and feature changes on the part of the hardware manufacturer.

Tremendous annual increases in data forced continuous and expensive system enhancements and migrations. The situation was simply becoming untenable.

The Solution

To break free from this cycle, NLS sought out a file storage solution that would:

• Manage large amounts of data in millions of files
• Easily and dynamically perform enhancements without being constrained by the hardware platform
• Protect files and data in the event of a complete or partial system crash

An end-to-end solution consisting of Scality RING running on HPE Apollo 4510 storage nodes and HPE Aruba 5950 infrastructure is delivering all that and more.