Business Challenge: For 35 years, the Asian Art Museum resided in San Francisco's picturesque Golden Gate Park. But when the museum, which houses nearly 15,000 works with an estimated worth of $4 billion, began to experience growing pains in the 1990s, the citizens of San Francisco voted to refurbish the city's former Main Library as its new home. The project required installation of a new data and telecommunications infrastructure, and the museum also wanted to add multimedia kiosks to give visitors a more interactive experience. Since the museum's outdated Dell servers were beginning to resemble some of the more antiquated items in its collection, James Horio, director of IT, needed to find new systems that could handle the load. And since the project involved a combination of public bonds and private funding, a reasonable price tag was a must.
Solution: In March 2003, the museum moved into its new 40,000-square-foot facility. In addition to the updated IT infrastructure, it now features a Cisco IP telephony system and more than a dozen multimedia kiosks with streaming audio and video. Under Horio's direction, the Dell servers were retired, and IBM iSeries and xSeries midrange systems took their place.
In the museum's current configuration, an i820 server houses eight Integrated xSeries blade servers and is linked to a smaller external xSeries server. The museum also has a number of other xSeries servers that support a variety of applications. This configuration enables the OS/400-based iSeries servers and the Windows-based xSeries blade servers to share storage resources and be managed from the same platform, eliminating the need for an additional administrator. It also avoids the expense and complexity that an Intel-based server farm would have involved. Finally, the IP telephony system streamlines telecommunications and administrative costs.
So far, the IBM servers have successfully supported the museum's multimedia, IP telephony, and other specialized applications by combining the advantages of AS/400 and Windows, says Horio. And project costs came in at a thrifty $800,000.
When it comes to IT, James Horio is a true renaissance man. Now director of IT at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Horio boasts an extensive resume: In addition to a stint as a programmer, he's held various IT positions with a cruise line, a diesel distributor, a medical instrument company, and several other private sector firms. His repertoire also includes experience with systems predating the Wintel era, such as the IBM System/32 and AS/400.
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