Case Study: The Field Museum achieves 60% file storage cost savings and unlimited on-demand scalability with Nasuni

Why The Field Museum Traded Storage Hardware for Enterprise File Services

The Field Museum, a Chicago-based public exhibit and scientific research institution, is digitizing a 30 million-item collection, producing large and unpredictable spikes of unstructured data (high-res images, DNA sequences, etc.). With a small IT team and a SAN built for databases, expanding hardware and using tape/disk backups became expensive, slow to provision and risky for timely recovery.

The museum adopted Nasuni’s cloud-native UniFS to get unlimited, on‑demand file capacity with local caching, simplified single‑pane management and continuous, geo‑redundant versioning (recoveries in minutes, with a 15‑minute RTO). The switch delivered faster file access, reduced management effort, and cut file storage costs by about 60% and storage management time by about 50%.

The Field Museum

Rob Zschernitz

Chief Technology Officer