Scotland entrusts national treasures to Scality RING

One of Scotland’s national cultural collections, the National Library of Scotland’s growing repository currently occupies 120 miles of shelving, with thousands of new items being added every single week. The library’s digitisation initiative makes the collections more accessible to the public, while preserving the important assets.

Accommodating the increasing volumes of digitised data and eliminating labour-intensive tape were two key requirements for the team at National Library of Scotland.  “Modernising and streamlining as we move into this period of mass digital growth moved us to simplified object storage, standardised on S3,” said Stuart Lewis, National Library of Scotland’s Associate Director.

The team chose Scality RING as the foundation of the Library's preservation storage with one copy in each of two on-premises RINGs in their Edinburgh and Glasgow data centres and a third copy in AWS Glacier Deep Archive.

Ease of management and the ability to scale easily and limitlessly as they add thousands of items each week, coupled with software licensing that doesn’t penalise them for choosing replication as their resiliency model because Scality licenses software on a “data protected” model, not total data stored, won them over. Offering modern, resilient S3-compatible storage, Scality made the choice even easier by providing a bitrot checker for digital preservation monitoring that streamlines the data integrity checking process. 

Things are going so well for them that the National Library of Scotland is looking at additional use cases. “Scality met all of our requirements and more,” added Lewis. “We’re looking at moving other backups, replacing tape with disk-to-disk backup; moving the non-print collections and even offering it as a service to other organisations, given its multi-tenancy capabilities.”