The Science Museum in London is part of a wider family of national museums which fall under the umbrella organisation National Museums of Science & Industry (NMSI). The history of the Science Museum over the last 100 years has been one of continual change. The exhibition galleries are never static for long, as they have to reflect and comment on the increasing pace of change in science, technology, industry and medicine.

This ethos was reflected by the organisation’s own future IT strategy. Many of the physical servers at The Science Museum were coming end of life and the IT team wanted to do things differently with a view to saving space and energy, whilst increasing network resilience. This initiated a review of virtualisation technologies and proven IT suppliers.

Amardeep Rai (ICT Development and Project Manager) at The Science Museum explains how “System Professional initially came on board with The Science Museum to provide us with a VMware Capacity Planning exercise and Technical Workshop. During this time we met various members of the Sys Pro team and their knowledge and professionalism impressed us. They provided us with a number of options, explained each of them in a completely non-biased way and helped us to make decisions on the best solution for NMSI. We developed a relationship over this period based on professionalism and trust which helped us to decide they were the correct company to partner with during the implementation stage."

Wayne Emerson, System Professional’s Project Account Manager explains how “The key Science Museum project requirements revolved around increasing the infrastructure resilience and reducing energy consumption, thereby ensuring more environmentally friendly internal systems. A HP EVA 4400 was selected as the recommended storage platform based around the Capacity Planning exercise outputs and also due to The Science Museum’s existing standardisation of HP for desktop and servers. VMware was chosen as the virtualisation platform, since it was deemed ‘best of breed’ and the most mature virtualisation product currently on the market.”

System Professional’s VMware installation has allowed Amardeep and the IT team to rationalise the server estate by a third whilst significantly increasing the infrastructure resilience. VMware’s Virtual Center allows The Science Museum to manage the new server infrastructure with a lot more flexibility and efficiency than before.

Amardeep is already looking to expand this solution to enable all physical servers which become end of life to be moved onto this new virtual platform. The new VMware solution will also be integral to the IT DR planning within The Science Museum.