Vintek has completed the digitalisation of the National Portrait Gallery’s collection of 2,500 portraits, leveraging Lenovo and DataCore technologies to provide greater access to the wider Australian public.
Specifically, the Adelaide-based consultancy firm built a new IT system for the Canberra-based gallery, creating a fully integrated digital asset management storage solution in the process.
Managed by Vintek, the high performance, hyper-converged storage solution is powered by DataCore’s Virtual SAN software and consists of x3650 Lenovo servers in a metro cluster configuration.
The solution took six weeks to build, test, install and deploy, including a data transfer of 20 terabytes of raw files to software-defined-storage.
“The new infrastructure is primed to support the National Portrait Gallery’s growth for the next five years,” Vintek founder and CEO Paul Vinton said.
“By leveraging software-defined storage with DataCore, the National Portrait Gallery has the flexibility to expand quickly and simply by adding extra hard drives to the servers and buying additional licenses as and when required.
“The solution has future-proofed the organisation, providing a stable environment for many years to come.”
Operating as a managed service provider (MSP) across Australia, Vintek specialises in cloud, security, disaster recovery and web hosting offerings, with expertise across a range of industry sectors, including healthcare, education, government and finance.
“We were after a scalable, reliable, fully-managed technology platform that could release our assets to the public, allow our image library to be updated in real time, and ultimately protect and secure our data while giving staff flexibility to plan and organise exhibitions,” National Portrait Gallery COO Trent Birkett explained.
“Since its implementation, the new system has increased the efficiency of internal processes, provided seamless integration of previously incompatible platforms and ensured improved security around our data.
“The National Portrait Gallery’s presence in the digital sphere is vital to the delivery of services to the Australian public. Investing in this system ensures we are able to continually improve our digital offer for our visitors and in our day-to-day business operations.”
Birkett said the new solution provides almost one million on-site and online visitors, providing greater accessibility and interactivity with the gallery’s expanding portrait collection.
“Today’s announcement is testament to our commitment and dedication to Lenovo’s vendor and channel partners,” Lenovo data centre group director A/NZ Rob Makin added.
“Through our alliance with DataCore, we’re uniquely positioned to provide government agencies such as the National Portrait Gallery with the reliability, cost efficiency, scalability and ease of management they need to succeed.”
Established in 1998, the National Portrait Gallery collects portraits of prominent Australians in history, with its permanent home opened in 2008 on King Edward Terrace, Canberra beside the High Court of Australia.
“The National Portrait Gallery is a great example of a leading government agency using hyper-converged, software-defined storage technology to digitally transform, as well as grow and scale at speed,” DataCore regional manager for Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) Marco Marinelli added.
