| Customer | Canadian Museum for Human Rights (www.humanrights.ca) |
| The Canadian Museum for Human Rights works to engage people all over the world in the human rights conversation, promoting respect through education and its thought-provoking installations. To make its content available to people globally, the Winnipeg, Manitoba, institution offers an online experience. It also optimizes its onsite installations with interactive digital experiences. | |
| Product and Services | DataON HCI-668 (S2D-5208i and DNS-4760 JBOD, optimized for performance and capacity)
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| Industry | Nonprofit |
| Organization Size | 1 to 50 employees |
| Country | Canada |
| Download | Case Study |
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights works to engage people all over the world in the human rights conversation, promoting respect and dialogue through education and its thought-provoking installations. To make its content available to people globally, the Winnipeg, Manitoba, institution offers a rich media storytelling experience online. It also optimizes its onsite installations with interactive digital experiences. The museum uses a hybrid hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) with Microsoft Azure Stack HCI solutions to establish the wholly software-defined datacenter it envisioned for maximum security and efficiency.
We clearly needed a hybrid solution, but we wanted to use the same tool set, administration, and training for both platforms. Only Microsoft checked all the boxes…. That’s why we chose Azure Stack HCI solutions.
Christopher Rivers: Director, Information Technology
Canadian Museum for Human Rights
The late Israel Asper, a Winnipeg philanthropist and entrepreneur, dreamed of creating a place where young Canadians could learn about the importance of protecting human rights. In 2008, the Government of Canada established the Canadian Museum for Human Rights as a national museum, and in 2014, Israel Asper’s dream was realized when the museum opened. The museum fosters an appreciation for human rights both within Canada and across the globe, providing interactive experiences for its gallery space visitors and rich online explorations on its website. It fulfills its demanding mission with a hybrid infrastructure that consolidates server virtualization and its storage with Microsoft Azure Stack HCI solutions.
Sharing the stories that inspire
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights included IT architecture in its startup plan, challenging its technical team to extend the museum’s message beyond its physical walls into the digital space. It wanted that digital experience to mesh seamlessly with exhibit content in the physical gallery space, like video games where both physical and online visitors predict Supreme Court of Canada rulings on human rights issues. “Our bigger vision is to curate and enable a global dialogue on human rights,” explains Christopher Rivers, Director of Information Technology at Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
The museum’s architecture plan called for an eventual move to the cloud, but the technology it required was yet to come. Multiple high-speed internet connections would have been needed to ensure that the museum could meet its performance standards for the interactive applications, information kiosks, and about 500 screens streaming high-definition video in its physical gallery. “We were very focused on the in-gallery experience then, and there wasn’t yet the level of technology available that we have today,” says Rivers. Given the lack of viable options, the museum decided to purchase the more traditional converged infrastructure in 2013—blade servers for compute connected to an enterprise storage area network (SAN).
But Rivers knew that to achieve the museum’s digital outreach ambitions, it would eventually adopt cloud computing. Its Digital Outreach team is currently running the website and other online collateral in the Azure public cloud platform, and staff are moving to Microsoft Office 365. When the museum’s original server and SAN devices reached end of life in late 2018, its path toward a hybrid infrastructure opened. “We clearly needed a hybrid solution, but we wanted to use the same tool set, administration, and training for both platforms,” says Rivers. “Only Microsoft checked all the boxes in the hybrid cloud world. That’s why we chose Azure Stack HCI solutions.”
Pulling it all together: a multipurpose digital architecture
The museum felt it would best steward its resources by adopting the most forward-looking, high-value solution available. Rivers and his team decided to use hyperconverged infrastructure to build its virtual machines (VMs), bulk storage, and backup clusters. The museum uses a third-party backup solution that takes advantage of low-cost Azure Blob storage, replicating to the Azure cloud platform to store nearly a petabyte of data. Rivers estimates that between 60 and 100 VMs are now on the new HCI infrastructure, running everything from daily operations (such as those involving ticket sales, gift shop sales, and memberships) to gallery content and digital surveillance systems. “We needed a solution that gave our developers and administrators the ability to use common tool sets on-premises and in the cloud, while meeting our security requirements and keeping capital and operational costs to a minimum,” says Rivers.
Through an open request for proposal (RFP), the museum engaged DataON—a Gold competency member of the Microsoft Partner Network—to help implement the migration. “The Canadian Museum for Human Rights has a great vision for how to take advantage of this technology,” says Howard Lo, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at DataON. “They’re combining the best of both worlds—public cloud and on-premises infrastructures—with their hybrid architecture.”
Protecting the data behind human rights stories
IT staff at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights defend against a range of potential threats, from safeguarding donor data to helping protect the identities of the people whose recorded stories add powerful content to the museum’s collection. Human rights activists and refugees from some of the world’s most dangerous places have shared their stories in detail; each one is 5 to 13 hours long. “We carry an all-important duty to protect these people from those who want to silence them,” says Rivers.
The museum is also concerned about hackers defacing its digital exhibitions with hate or pornographic material, especially long-form content like PDFs where hackers could bury misinformation. “We’re trying to be the most digitally attractive museum in the world,” says Rivers. “And we back that up with a very robust information security plan.”
The museum is advancing its hybrid architecture plans with an end-to-end Azure deployment. “We’re fully adopting Azure services for monitoring and security, configuration management, and backups, and we’re beginning to use Azure Advanced Threat Protection,” says Rivers. “We optimize resources and enhance security with the cloud and ensure high performance with Azure Stack HCI solutions.”
We’re fully adopting Azure services for monitoring and security, configuration management, and backups, and we’re beginning to use Azure Advanced Threat Protection. We optimize resources and enhance security with the cloud and ensure high performance with Azure Stack HCI solutions.
Christopher Rivers: Director, Information Technology
Canadian Museum for Human Rights
We’re trying to be the most digitally attractive museum in the world. And we back that up with a very robust information security plan.
Christopher Rivers: Director, Information Technology
Canadian Museum for Human Rights
