Sun Microsystems Keeps The Virtual Museum of Canada Open 7x24

Discover Canada's Heritage Online

A school trip to the museum was always full of adventure and wonder. It meant a day out of class, a ride into the city, and learning about art and history with beautiful sculptures, paintings, and artifacts. However, this wasn't the case for every student. The museum could be a fifteen-minute drive to Toronto from a school in the suburbs, or a two-hour ride from Timmins, Ontario. Unfortunately, for many students in rural communities, art class may have been all slides and videos. Trips to museums were sometimes not possible. The cost of transportation was too high or there wasn't time in the school day to travel to the museum in the city.

A trip to the museum is an experience full of wonder and surprise. Every professional and student alike should have the opportunity to enjoy Canadian art and culture, regardless of geography. A student in Dawson's Creek should be exposed to the same experiences as one in downtown Vancouver or Montreal.

Canada's museum community and the Government of Canada recognized the need to develop a resource that could be used to share information and offer Canadians a place to visit both the country's renowned and less known museums. The resource had to erase the traditional images of dusty old buildings where visitors were escorted by volunteers from one exhibit to another and replace it with a vehicle to showcase the splendor and culture within the various museums and their exhibits. With the growing popularity of the Internet, the answer was simple - design and launch the world's most comprehensive virtual museum. The Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC) appeals to people of different ages, cultures, and occupations. It unites the Canadian heritage community in a way that was never before imaginable. It does not matter where a school is located or which remote area you live, the finest exhibits from many of the country's museums are now available to Canadians with the simple click of a mouse at any time. Heading up the project is the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), an agency with the Department of Canadian Heritage which understands and promotes the use of the Internet to keep the museum community of Canada online and informed. In order to develop this virtual museum, CHIN needed to collaborate with a company that could provide the stable and robust technology to meet its requirements. When CHIN made its move to the Internet in 1995, it chose Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc.

"When we started working with Sun Microsystems systems, we converted 22 databases (approximately 16 gigabytes) from a proprietary operating system to UNIX®, in just under nine months" said Rob Dallas, Manager of Operations for CHIN. To date, with the power of Sun's SolarisTM Operating Environment, CHIN can search large databases approximately 20 gigabytes in size efficiently and present results within acceptable response times."

When CHIN decided to undertake the development of the Virtual Museum of Canada, there was no doubt that it would once again collaborate with Sun Microsystems. After six years of working with Sun, CHIN engaged the company to develop a platform to support its multimedia requirements. CHIN needed a robust, scalable and highly available platform that would deliver a seamless experience for users regardless of the type of information they wanted to access (text, graphics, video etc.) as well as support the anticipated traffic to the site.