Inside the V&A's boiler room

The Victoria and Albert Museum's IT department - dubbed the "boiler room" by its information systems services head Sarah Winmill - is just completing a two-year programme of major infrastructure overhaul.

Two years ago, the V&A IT department was in charge of a hardware estate that might have felt more at home as one of the museum's exhibits. Half the desktops were soon to see their seventh birthday - and the "make do and mend" server room played home to a sprawling server portfolio.

At the end of the programme IT is now more modern art than antiquity: all desktops were replaced using an OGC framework agreement and now come with a four-year warranty, courtesy of Viglen.

Winmill said: "I would argue for the first time we were able to nail who had what, our licence position - I am confident we are fully compliant with everything, because now we have full visibility. As a result, the overhead in managing the desktops significantly decreased. It freed people up to do the job of improving things rather than just keeping them going."

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The servers too have been replaced and now have a new server room to house them. "We have a genuinely stable environment which we didn't have two years ago," according to the IT head.

The IT improvements don't stop there: the museum's storage environment is in the middle of an overhaul, scheduled to be complete by February.

"That's all ticking along very nicely," Winmill told silicon.com. "And we're now into what is basically the slow grind of moving and going through the layers of archaeology of file permissions across the organisation, so we're migrating user data into the new storage environment on the on-store boxes and using it as a catalyst to go through and tidy up things. It's a long old slog."

With the two-year infrastructure overhaul nearly behind it, the V&A's techies will next turn their attention to updating the organisation's email and adding new archiving capabilities to its GroupWise mail.

The V&A is a Novell house - an allegiance that's not likely to be dissolved any time soon.

"[The question of moving away from Novell] does bubble up from time to time -clearly other organisations are moving away from it. What we like about it is, it's rock solid - it does the job, it doesn't need masses of other products to deal with all the problems it brings for you. If you search on Exchange, there are many, many companies offering products to solve problems and you don't see the same with GroupWise. It just does the job for us."

With a major economic downturn on the horizon, IT departments across the country are being faced with budgetary cutbacks and are looking to trim the technological fat. For the V&A, the recession is inspiring a new eye on printing.

"I will be doing a print audit next financial year. I will be looking to remove personal printers - it's something we've shied away from to a degree, we've said we won't replace any personal printers, so as they die they leave but this is taking it a step further and acknowledging the costs are very high on them and actually seeking them out and pushing people over to multifunction devices and workgroup printers," she said.

Applications too are for the chop, as the...

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