The National Diet Library Encourages Efficient Digitization of its Collection by Using Both On-premise and Cloud

INDUSTRY

Public Institutions and Government

CHALLENGES

• Renewal of legacy environment which is unable to handle vast volume of digitization and data storage demands
• Complexity in handling a mix of business processes with different service levels
• Complete system construction within a short period of time

SOLUTION

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

• AOS Storage
• AHV
• Kubernetes Engine

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

• Intelligent Operations

Nutanix Technical Account Management (TAM) Service

Storage Services with CIFS & NFS for Application

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Applications

• Data management and storage applications for digitizing books and other materials
  

BENEFITS

• Easy of management gives confidence to bring infrastructure management in-house
• Optimized business efficiency through separation of service delivery and data storage execution environment
• Increased operational efficiency and significant reduction in management man-hours
• Complete setup in 3 months by tapping on Nutanix's extensive experience and know-how

CHALLENGES

The National Diet Library was opened in 1948 based on the founding principle that "the truth shall set us free. It is the only national library in Japan that belongs to the National Diet. Along with supporting the activities of the National Diet, the library is responsible for collecting and preserving a wide range of Japan's cultural assets for long-lasting preservation and providing these information resources to the public.

An important recent theme has been about the call to respond to digitization and requests for online library services due to IT developments and the coronavirus pandemic. With the goal of accurately connecting information resources to various intellectual activities, the library has designated 2021 to 2025 as the "Digital Shift of the National Diet Library" promotion period, during which seven priority projects.

One of the priority projects, "Accelerating Digitalization of Materials," aims to create a future in which all domestic publications can be read digitally and will promote the digitization of more than 1 million volumes of materials in its collection over the five years from FY2021 to FY2025.

The National Diet Library has approximately 45.61 million items in its collection (in 2020), and the scale of the digitization operation is enormous, and the ever-increasing number of digitized materials places enormous demands on data storage. Therefore, in February 2021, the library began procuring a solution to renew and accelerate its digitization operation system.

SOLUTION

The National Diet Library has been considering the use of public cloud services and other means to improve the efficiency of its operations while ensuring the permanent storage of materials, including digital information. The library is trying to optimize its digitization operations by hosting the management and permanent storage of data generated during digitization process in the library’s server room and operating the “Digital Collection of the National Diet Library” in the cloud for online searching and viewing.

As part of its efforts to improve the efficiency of its digitization operations, the National Diet Library decided to adopt hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) as its virtualization platform to simplify the environment supporting the storage and management of image data, and to bring IT infrastructure management in-house. In the procurement process to realize this vision, the library selected Nutanix Elevate Partner Marubeni Information Systems Co., Ltd which completed the construction of this system in a short period of just three months.

The library utilizes Nutanix AHV, a Red Hat certified hypervisor, for the virtualization environment that supports digitization operations, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating system. The library runs approximately 60 virtual machines, including applications that support digital storage of books and other image data. The digital image data is stored temporarily through these applications and in large-capacity storage. Furthermore, each data in the system is delivered via public cloud on AWS.

In this way, the new digitization operations system enables efficient and optimum operation of digitization operations by using on-premises and public clouds in the right places according to the operating environment of the applications and the purpose of storing digitized data.

CUSTOMER OUTCOMES

The Nutanix platform selected by Marubeni Information Systems as the foundation to support its digitization operations is a software-based HCI solution. The factory-verified hardware comes as an appliance with preinstalled software, which greatly reduced the time required for deployment. Because Nutanix is a unified storage plus computing solution that distributes and protects data across all nodes in the system, it eliminated the need for external storage, which was required in a traditional three-tier configuration, leading to system simplification.

The management console Nutanix Prism, which provides intuitive operability, offers the advantage of operational efficiency for the library. By employing the Nutanix Technical Account Management (TAM) service, the library was able to learn basic Nutanix operation management techniques and general troubleshoot cases, and successfully brought the upgrade of the virtualization environment and various other operational management in-house. As a result, a significant reduction in management man-hours was achieved.

NEXT STEPS

As the digital society progresses, the National Diet Library aims to pass on Japan's rich cultural assets to the future. The library is using the digitization operation system to promote efficient digitization, and is also developing applications that will serve as the backend functions for the National Diet Library's digital collection.