Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA): Japanese Overseas Migration Museum
Preserving and Sharing Cultural Heritage with Sun Fire Servers, Sun Ray Terminals and the Solaris 10 Operating SystemThe Japanese Overseas Migration Museum, in Yokohama, Japan, tells the story of more than 100 years of Japanese migration to North and South America, as Japanese descendants overseas now total about 2.5 million. The museum, run by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), opened in 2002 and receives about 30,000 visitors per year. JICA sees the museum's stories of Japanese integration into diverse societies as an important way to introduce the concept of multiculturalism in the home islands. Customer Challenges
SolutionTo support a new Adobe Flash Player-based content management system, which provided information to both museum visitors and online inquirers, the museum adopted a highly scalable, reliable and energy-efficient content delivery server network and durable, low-maintenance display terminals Business Results
Story DetailsThe Japanese Overseas Migration Museum, in the port city of Yokohama, presents the stories of the Japanese people who emigrated to the New World in the late 19th and 20th centuries and their descendants. The museum supplements its exhibits of photographs, documents, maps and artifacts with video, audio clips of emigrants' oral histories and digital images. About 30,000 people visit in person every year, but the museum, a project of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), strives to share its resources online with a worldwide audiences. When the museum opened in 2002, JICA chose Sun servers and terminals because of their versatility and high performance. In May 2006, the museum decided to refresh and expand its infrastructure to support a new multimedia content delivery system based on Adobe Flash Player, and cope with an ever-expanding volume of digital exhibits. The museum also wanted to reduce its energy bills and cooling requirements, as well as the downtime computers would need for maintenance. Sun products were once again the natural choice, even beating out competitors like HP.
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At JICA, demand for energy conservation is growing stronger. Now that we have employed Sun servers, we can drastically cut down on power consumption.
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— Yoshikazu Koike, Deputy Director, JICA
The museum staff worked with systems integrator AZM Co., Ltd., to create the new platform. Taking the environmental impact of the servers into consideration, the museum selected Sun CoolThreads servers for their low power consumption and low heat generation. To support the flash-based content display system, AZM assembled a configuration of five Sun Fire T2000 servers, with three of them earmarked for delivering content within the museum and to the Internet, one for production applications and the last as a database server. The application and database servers can each serve as a standby for the other, so the system will not shut down even if one of the servers fails. This helpful redundancy is due to the Solaris Containers feature in the Solaris 10 Operating System, which allows for software partitions for creating the standby servers. The museum also uses two Sun Fire V215 servers for video content delivery. At the same time, the museum installed 30 Sun Ray terminals, at which visitors can view digital exhibits. Without CPUs or hard disks, these terminals are quiet and energy efficient. The systems have a high degree of uptime and can be configured from the server without needing to be shut down, which means higher availability for visitors. The museum staff got valuable support from the local Sun Solution Center in Japan for testing and validating the new system's operation. Because the Sun infrastructure could be completely configured and tested at the Center, the actual installation and data migration went very quickly, and the museum remained open during the migration. The new hardware went into production in April 2007. Soon after, the museum saw a 66 percent drop in power consumption and expects the air conditioning cost for the server room to decrease drastically. Additionally, the new solution has aided the museum in planning new programs, such as a virtual exhibit recreating the town of Registro, the first Japanese settlement in Brazil, and creating resource-sharing networks with Japanese cultural centers in South America. |
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