Case Study

The Field Museum Overcomes Unpredictable File Growth and Rising Costs with Nasuni Cloud File Services

The Field Museum vastly improves data protection and achieves a 60% reduction in total infrastructure costs with Nasuni.

The Field Museum is both a major public exhibit space and a nonprofit scientific research institution. Based in Chicago, the museum stores, maintains and continually adds to a collection of 30 million items. Like many museums, The Field Museum digitizes all its items to ensure there is an electronic record. Combined with ongoing research efforts to sequence the genomes of various species, this has led to a steady increase in file storage volume. IT had also been noticing a larger shift away from structured and virtual machine data to files and other unstructured data. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of high-resolution image files had to be stored on the network, plus DNA sequencing data and traditional office documents. Yet the museum was relying on a traditional Storage Area Network (SAN) that had been optimized for database storage. After evaluating several cloud-related options, The Field Museum chose Nasuni for unlimited capacity, on-demand scalability, simplified management, and high-performace file access.