The British Library – more than most organisations – is in the business of storage. The key difference between the British Library and other institutions, however, is that what is being stored is more often interesting and historically important data.
The library’s need for digital storage has risen inexorably. Its current capacity is about three-quarters of a petabyte.

“Storage is just a never-ending requirement. The demand for digitisation grows and grows,” said Stephen Lilgert, head of infrastructure strategy and development at the British Library. “Looking at a storage strategy – we have storage area network islands and we are exploring our storage virtualisation options.

“Within the organisation people have a requirement for archive-level storage. Not all of it is tier one, but we do have high-availability tier one for the VMware infrastructure.”

The library shaved £14,000 off its electricity bill and cut £4,500 in cooling costs when it deployed VMware across its two datacentres. It also reduced datacentre floor use by seven per cent.

“Floor space is a serious issue for us,” said Lilgert. “All of the space saved by consolidating the servers is being taken up with more storage.”

The government-funded organisation estimates that by running 25 virtual servers per physical machine it saved the cost of between 70 and 80 servers in the past nine months alone.

“In network terms VMware ESX clusters need significant bandwidth. All of our servers run at 10 Gbit/s Ethernet,” said Lilgert.
But the downside is that the bottlenecks are at the application and server level and not at the network level, which, according to Lilgert, “usually gets the blame for everything”.

There was a time when anyone requesting a document from the British Library set off a trail of activity that involved photocopying and postage. When the library began investing in scanners to ease the burden, the shared 10Mbit/s Ethernet network just could not cope.

The library has two datacentres, one in London at its St Pancras main site and one at Boston Spa in Yorkshire. The IT department is known as the e-information systems directorate. It has 142 staff, about 50 of whom work in the operational sector. There is a 100Mbit/s link between the sites which will be upgraded to 200Mbit/s in the next couple of months.

The library is continually making digital copies of some of its 150 million items. It recently digitised 19th century newspapers at its Boston Spa reading rooms, a project that involved using A0-size scanners with each paper producing a 100MB file. However, sending these up and down the network causes some pressure.
“We are constrained by government funding,” said Lilgert – the library is funded through the Department of Culture Media and Sport.

“We always look at potential partnerships and at all the potential digitisation options. We have regular exhibitions – a current one is called Taking Liberties and involves displaying a copy of the Magna Carta, often cited as the most important document in the history of Britain.”

Items from the exhibition are being made available on the www.bl.uk web site.
The British Library was the chosen venue for the UK launch of Microsoft’s Vista operating system, and the event saw then-Microsoft chairman Bill Gates pay a visit.
As part of the arrangement, Gates allowed the library to digitise and make available his personal acquisition of an original codex (notebook) of Leonardo Da Vinci. The codex was made available for download for a limited time. The library regularly makes historical documents available for digital download, including its own Da Vinci codex. Items such as original Beatles’ lyric sheets and handwritten Lewis Carroll books are also stored by the library and have b een digitised.

The library’s 150 million documents are added to at a rate of about three million items per year. “We’ll never digitise everything,” said Lilgert.

The history of IT at the British Library

Over the past 10 years the British Library’s IT moved from running old Digital Vax boxes with dumb terminals through Dos 11 to Windows NT and upgrading the network became an imperative.

The library has been a Foundry Networks customer since 1999 and after a second competitive tender in 2004, it was chosen again to be the main switch supplier.
“I told the management that I was not in the business of putting in a cheap network, but of putting in a good network. With networks you have to plan four to five years out,” said Lilgert.

The prospect of Foundry being bought by Brocade, which announced a recent $3bn (£1.5bn) takeover bid, is fine with Lilgert.

“Given that this is Brocade I am not worried. We use Brocade for fibre channel switches, and as far I am concerned, the two companies are mutually exclusive.
If Foundry had been bought by Cisco, it would have been horrific, the identity would change and the switch architecture would have changed,” he said. Aware that he might have given a hostage to fortune, Lilgert added: “Come back and ask me again in 12 months.”