Bonhams Auctioneers, London, creates streamlined work flow with Enterprise level image server from Denmark
Bonhams is the world’s oldest and largest auctioneer of fine art and antiques, (still in British ownership), and is the fastest growing and third largest international auction house with over 700 auctions annually.
Bonhams has developed an internal web delivered application that enables its staff, (In place all over the world) to produce contracts for vendors of items coming up for auction. A contract includes all the information necessary for setting up an item for auction, including images of the item.
Historically the images were captured on film, and then scanned, and low resolutions were resized by a special application to produce two different sizes of each image. Other images captured by digital camera were run through the same application, but nothing was scalable.
Global IT Director Roland Whitehead, Bonhams: "Then eRez came to our aid. It took only two days to get it running. eRez is pretty central for our operation, from storing to resizing, embedding PID´s (Product Identification) and resizing for print production."
Bonham’s produces a huge amount of original pages, which are available on the web and as printed catalogues of items coming up for auction.
Bonhams use a Progress database with stock detail and contract information for all vendors. Each contract and item has a number and each item has an image. Images are coming in from all over the world, and the database saves a pointer to the locally stored image. A Perl script then uploads the image from the local machine to one of two eRez image servers based in London and San Francisco, where a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) call is run telling the eRez server to produce a pyramid TIFF file. Finally, the image is stored in appropriate folders, one for optimized pyramid TIFF images and one for the original files on the eRez image server. The folders correspond to paths specified in the database.
Images are stored in different sizes: "There are 'full bleed' A3 and 'normal' A4 images stored in 300 dpi, as well as 'happy-snappy' images which can be massive", says Roland Whitehead.
Presently Bonhams stores 3 terabytes, equivalent to 1.5 million image records, on its image servers! Bonham’s is adding 14 terabytes of storage replicated in 2 physically separated Storage area networks for their London site. With a 3GHz twin dual core server Bonhams expects to see even more images served through their eRez server.
