Rijksmuseum

The Customer

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is the Netherlands’ largest and most important museum. It boasts a collection of 1.3 million specimens worth approximately 8 billion euros. Paintings by 17th-century Dutch masters account for a large portion of the museum’s broad collection, which also includes antique furniture, jewelry, textiles, porcelain, and photographs.

The Rijksmuseum manages a number of internationally renowned collections in the field of Dutch art and history from the Middle Ages onwards, as well as important collections of European and Asian artworks. The museum’s objectives are to conserve these collections, to study them and add to them, and to make them accessible to as wide an audience as possible, both nationally and internationally.

The Request

The Rijksmuseum uses the Internet as an important tool in its strategy to draw in visitors. It sees its sophisticated web environment as an integral part of the actual museum. The Rijksmuseum has put high-resolution images of many well-known works of art on its website, which allows viewers to zoom in for a very close look.
 

The performance of the Rijksmuseum’s website is critical to its business model. Therefore, it needed a flexible hosting solution that supports PHP, along with dynamic load balancing. The solution also needed to be highly secure as its website has been the target of numerous attacks by spammers and hackers, such as DDoS.

The Solution

Leaseweb gave Rijksmuseum a VMware private cloud that utilizes leading-brand dedicated servers and networking equipment. This solution offers dynamic load balancing to help mitigate flash crowds, and the latest firewall technology that provides excellent network security. The solution also provides access to a state-of-the-art network with massive bandwidth, which significantly reduces the impact of any DDoS attack.
 

Although Rijksmuseum’s requirements did not include environmentally sound hosting or sustainable hosting, the CO2-neutral character of the data center the solution resides in is highly appreciated.
 

Leaseweb provided the design for the hosting infrastructure. Its highly trained engineers take care of the hardware, the virtualization layer, and the monitoring of the hardware. Leaseweb is also responsible for creating the system back-ups for the Rijksmuseum. This allows Rijksmuseum’s staff to focus on its primary business.