Museum of London Achieves Fast Recovery for Mission-Critical Oracle Databases and Eliminates Tape

Overview

Established in 1976, the Museum of London is an award-winning cultural history museum that showcases the history of the English capital city from prehistoric to modern times. With more than six million objects, the museum boasts the largest urban history collection in the world. Its two current locations, the Museum of London and the Museum of London Docklands, together host over a million visitors every year. The museum has also received countless awards, including “European Museum of the Year” in 2012.

Adam Monnery, Head of Information and Communications Technology, leads a team of eight to manage everything IT-related, including telephony, network, and in-house infrastructure. The team supports over 300 employees.

“Previously, our key objective was putting in place the right infrastructure to enable us to protect and scale our massive digital collection. Now, we’re focused on delivering value back to the business. This means adopting collaboration tools, mobilizing our workforce, and enabling our business to work cross-functionally,” said Monnery. “Rubrik is a critical piece of that puzzle.”

Solutions

Native integration with Oracle RMAN for faster recoveries

The Museum of London ran high priority workloads, including its main collections database, on Oracle. “With our legacy solution, we were heavily reliant on a dump-and-scrape method for backup. Also, everything was archived to tape. If we wanted to recover our files, we’d have to create a database from our backups, however, since we outsourced our Oracle DBAS, we weren’t confident enough to handle Oracle restores internally,” said Monnery. Rubrik’s seamless integration with Oracle RMAN provides peace of mind to Monnery’s team. “It’s a huge relief for us knowing that our most critical database is protected with Rubrik. We can instantly find our Oracle backups and files and recover quickly from any point-in-time snapshot,” Monnery said.

Delivering instant recovery and cloud mobility back to the business

Monnery and team were introduced to Rubrik by their reseller, IGX Global. While the team evaluated several different vendors, they were disappointed by the lack of innovation among the other solutions. “Everyone wanted to sell us tape, SAN to SAN replication for disaster recovery, or more backup storage and software. Everything was on separate platforms and brought additional costs and management overhead,” said Monnery.

“Rubrik brought a fresh approach to data protection. We loved that it was vendor-agnostic and cloud-native, giving us the flexibility to scale to any cloud. It also provided consumer-grade simplicity combined with policy-based intelligence and fast recoveries,” said Monnery. The Museum of London now uses Rubrik to manage its physical and virtual environment, including its SQL and Oracle databases.

Total hard savings before and after Rubrik

Rubrik has helped the Museum of London reduce its TCO by 15%. “With Rubrik, we’ve drastically reduced backup software licensing costs and are no longer using tape for daily and monthly backups,” said Monnery. “Overall, Rubrik has provided us with a far more advanced and streamlined data management architecture.”