BlueBridge to Provide Cloud-Based Storage Solution for Cleveland Museum of Art; Donates up to $600K to Project

CLEVELAND, July 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- BlueBridge Networks, a cloud-based data storage and recovery company headquartered in Cleveland, has recently added to its prestigious collection of customers the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). In this critical role, BlueBridge will be moving CMA from a physical media long-term archive to a multi-location disk-based solution, which will dramatically improve the media's lifespan, provide a geographically disparate archive and improve future portability to next-generation platforms.

BlueBridge has donated up to $600,000 to the project as part of the company's ongoing commitment to reinvest in the community.

"We are honored to provide CMA with one of the most robust, resilient and flexible cloud storage platforms in the market, and to protect data that is priceless to us and to future generations," said Kevin Goodman, managing director and partner of BlueBridge. Goodman added that his long-standing respect for CMA developed at an early age, when he visited the museum during elementary school field trips and fell in love with the grounds, the architecture and the exhibits. "To be intimately connected with preserving that heritage today is truly rewarding," he said.

"In many ways, this is a hometown project, yet one with global implications. The world looks to CMA for its wonderful collections and it's amazing knowledge, and I can't tell you how excited we at BlueBridge are to play a role in their ongoing achievements," Goodman said.

"We are pleased to partner with a Cleveland-based company on this project," said David Franklin, Director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. "As I have commented on previously, the talent exists right here in Northeast Ohio to help us find solutions to many of our complex technological challenges."

The BlueBridge team worked closely with IT visionaries at the museum to coordinate the ideal solution, according to Jane Alexander, director of information management and technology services at CMA. "The museum's project team, lead by Niki Krause and made up of staff from the museum archives, conservation management, photo studio and conservation, selected a cloud-based archival repository to provide redundancy/long-term preservation more efficiently than the museum could support in-house; increase staff efficiency in retrieving specific digital materials; and eliminate the need for 1,000-plus gold DVDs a year," Alexander said.

The solution custom designed for CMA will leverage several key components of BlueBridge's Enterprise cloud, including block-level WAN replication, file-level restore functionality and valuating technology on the long-term archive to prevent any unintended overwrites of priceless data. Existing technologies used by BlueBridge's cloud storage also allow BlueBridge to provide one site to many WAN replication should the need ever arise to house data in multiple locations.

Scott Lee, general manager of infrastructure solutions at BlueBridge, noted:  "When this project began, I was probably the most excited I've ever been in my career to be part of such an undertaking. To give you an idea of the scope of the project, as part of the migration process, over 2,200 DVDs worth of data will be transferred.  And while physical media has long been a staple for long-term archive, given the cultural importance of the data, it was imperative that we designed a solution for CMA  that would provide a viable path to future archive platforms, while also drastically improving the resiliency and recoverability of the files.

"To that end, we feel like BlueBridge's cloud storage platform had the perfect blend of manageability and resiliency to help the museum."

SOURCE BlueBridge Networks