CUSTOMER PROFILE

The Tech Museum of Innovation is a hands-on technology and science museum that engages people of all ages and backgrounds in exploring and experiencing the technologies affecting their lives. Located in San Jose, California, its mission, as a public-benefit corporation, is to inspire the innovator in everyone. Through an expansive variety of interactive exhibits, educational programs, an annual Tech Challenge team competition for youth, and the internationally recognized Tech Museum Awards, The Tech Museum honors the past, celebrates the present, and encourages the development of innovative ideas for a more promising future. Web site: www.thetech.org.

The Tech Museum, by its very charter, seeks to provide awe-inspiring, memorable, and even life-altering experiences. “The Tech is a place where people get inspired by witnessing big innovations,” says Peter Friess, president of The Tech Museum. “Young people come out of The Tech with a deeper understanding of the technologies they see every day. Sometimes they even experience one of those ‘aha!’ moments that can have a profound impact on the direction of their lives—their educational and career choices.”

THE CHALLENGE

Create a scalable storage infrastructure to support a growing base of user-generated data along with a CRM systemFor a decade, The Tech’s staff had been looking for a system that would enhance and extend its visitors’ experience by enabling them to learn additional information or refer to things they learned during their visits. To make this vision a reality, The Tech devel-oped an innovative “TechTag” system that personalizes the museum experience.

Each TechTag is imprinted with a personal-ized URL and barcode that allow visitors to explore exhibits in new ways and gather information during visits for later viewing on personalized Web pages. Electronic barcode readers located throughout the museum detect the ID and store desired information in the visitor’s account. For example, a visitor’s Web page might include photo-graphs, digital creations such as 3D avatars, personalized screen names, information from interaction with museum exhibits, and other self-produced content.

The Tech’s “Genetics: Technology with a Twist” exhibit provides a glimpse into how the TechTag allows visitors to expand the learning experience. The exhibit’s

Success Story

The Tech Museum of Innovation Builds Personalization System on NetApp Foundation

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

IndustryEducation

The challengeSecure a scalable storage infrastructure to host visitor-generated content and to support an evolving customer rela-tionship management (CRM) system.

The solutionNetApp® FAS960 storage system delivers reliability, performance, and scalability to accommodate growth.

Benefits• Supported 30% increase in system

use while providing consistent performance and steadfast reliability

• Scaled to accommodate increasingly intensive data formats

• Enabled capture of behavior and preference data for growing number of visitors

Wet Lab allows visitors to modify the DNA of a bacteria sample using genetic material extracted from a glowing jellyfish. Then a TechTag-enabled lab companion enables visitors to link the lab samples to personalized Web pages. The day after their visit, visitors can go online to see their own bacteria samples growing in The Tech’s incubator. They can even post the results to personal-ized e-postcards and send them to their friends and family.

“When a fourth grader can perform such an experiment at the exhibit, and then log in to see the results and even share his or her work with family and friends, the experience has the power to ignite a deep interest in science and technology,” explains Friess.

After visitors leave the museum, whether at home, school, or on a return visit, they can access their personal online account from any computer to view their content. They can also retrieve information about museum events or use their account as a link to other content.

As the TechTag program came together, The Tech staff began looking for a robust storage solution to serve as the foundation of its IT infrastructure, which also relies on computer systems, networking equipment, and soft-ware donated by other technology vendors.

“It was essential that we have a very reliable, scalable, and high-performing storage infrastructure to support the TechTag program,” says Friess. “With the goal of personalizing each visitor’s experience, plus the expectation that the program would help drive visitor attendance, we knew from the start that we would have substantial storage requirements.”

Today, The Tech Museum typically welcomes some 7,000 visitors a week. “Thanks to our popularity as a school field trip destination and the success of traveling exhibitions such as the highly acclaimed ‘Body Worlds’ plastination exhibit we recently hosted, weekly attendance often jumps above 10,000, and annual attendance is approaching 700,000,” Friess says.

Security was another major concern for Friess and his team because of the privacy protection required for each visitor’s data. “Each visitor who uses the TechTag system stores his or her personal content on our systems, and we have to make sure that visitors’ privacy is secure. At the same time, we have to maintain the security of our own internal operations as well.”

THE SOLUTION

NetApp FAS960 storage system delivers a reliable foundation and scales easilyNetApp stepped up to support The Tech’s mission, donating a NetApp FAS960 storage system with NetApp Data ONTAP® manage-ment software to deliver a reliable, high-performance storage architecture that would meet The Tech’s vision and accommodate its future growth.

“Receiving the NetApp FAS960 system was the turning point in the TechTag project. NetApp made it all possible by providing a solid foundation for the IT infrastructure,” says Friess.

The TechTag project originated using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. Recent advances in RFID, networking, and data storage had made it possible for muse-ums to offer visitors powerful new learning opportunities. Recently, The Tech replaced the RFID technology with more cost-effective barcode technology. “The RFID technology was costing us 50 cents for every chip provided to a visitor,” Friess says. “As attendance grew, this became an expensive proposition. The barcode tags, in contrast, don’t cost us anything other than the original investment in barcode readers.”

“ The scalable capacity and performance of NetApp’s storage solution enables us to easily manage the increase in data that comes with the growing attendance, and it has also given us the ability to store much richer content than we had originally envisioned.”Peter Friess President, The Tech Museum

Friess points out that the barcode technology has also enabled The Tech to expand the usefulness of the data capture. Recently, The Tech made the TechTag the “all-access pass” for the whole museum, including the IMAX theater. In addition, the museum is incorporating the barcode data into a CRM system that enables personnel to track visitor statistics and to develop ongoing relationships with visitors through programs such as test memberships and multiday tickets.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

NetApp’s solution grows in unison with The Tech’s expanding community and visionThe TechTag system went online in March 2004 with 20 exhibits enabled. Since then, the museum has increased the number of TechTag-enabled exhibits each year and currently has about 50. In addition, the number of TechTag users who visit their my.thetech.org Web site continues to climb.

“When we initiated the TechTag program, about 10% of our visitors took advantage of it. Today, that has expanded to 40%. We expect this trend will continue as TechTags evolve as a core element of future visitor experiences,” Friess says.

Overall, the museum’s attendance continues to increase by leaps and bounds. In the last year alone, attendance nearly doubled, from 350,000 to 629,000. “We expect this increased attendance—along with our ongoing expansion of the TechTag program and our new focus on collecting data to support visitor research—to result in continued data growth for some time,” Friess says.

“The scalable capacity and performance of NetApp’s storage solution enables us to easily manage the increase in data that comes with the growing attendance, and it has also given us the ability to store much richer content than we had originally envi-sioned. For example, it is helping us meet the heightened demand for storing data-intensive formats such as video,” Friess says.

Friess explains that the prevalence of video on sites such as YouTube has driven the demand for video capture and storage capabilities throughout the museum. Visitors want to capture video at the TechTag-enabled exhibits and store it for later retrieval on their personalized Web sites, thereby creating an appetite for storage capacity that may never be satisfied.

The simple administration of NetApp’s solution has also been a key benefit for The Tech. “The ability to restore files from Snapshot™ copies, along with features such as AutoSupport, makes our lives a lot easier,” notes Dela Tsiagbe, senior information technology architect for The Tech Museum. “Recently, we upgraded from Data ONTAP 6 to version 7 with NetApp’s support. This has been a huge help to us in maintaining our Smartmuseum exhibits.”

Tsiagbe points out that The Tech relies on its NetApp storage infrastructure for disaster recovery as well. “We currently perform disk-to-disk backups on the NetApp infra-structure, and we are looking at additional solutions that will help us refine this strategy as we continue to scale and grow.”

Although frequently recognized for their leadership, the hardworking staff of The Tech Museum does not rest on its laurels. They continually pursue new projects that will showcase the technologies of the future. “We are only at the beginning of what we hope to achieve with the TechTag system. Our ultimate goal is to extend the learning experience as far as you can imagine, and we are so pleased to work in collaboration

www.netapp.com

NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost efficiency. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.

© 2009 NetApp. All rights reserved. Specifications are subject to change without notice. NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further, faster, Data ONTAP, SnapMirror, SnapRestore, and Snapshot are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. CSS-6164-0109

with NetApp toward this end,” Friess points out. “NetApp’s technology has us well equipped to achieve this goal and continually improve upon it.”

A model for othersTechTags have become a model for other museums to emulate. Leading institutions around the U.S. have or are looking into utilizing TechTags or similar technology in their exhibits in order to personalize, improve, and extend the visitor experience. In addition, the technology is finding its way into the corporate arena, with companies adopting it for use in applications such as trade-show exhibits.

SOLUTION COMPONENTS

NetApp ProductsNetApp FAS960 with DS14 shelves

NetApp FAS250

NetApp F220

NetApp Data ONTAP 7

NetApp SnapMirror® software

NetApp SnapRestore® software

ProtocolsCIFS, NFS