The Virtual Visits program will enable schools that are unable to visit the Museum, to still experience the British Museum collection and access to staff via a learning session broadcast directly into their classroom. Following successful pilots, 35,000 places over the next five years will be available for pupils from across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to take part and become virtual visitors.

Virtual Visits have been created with the curriculum needs of schools in mind and is designed around the realities of classroom technology. Sessions are offered on prehistory Britain, Roman Britain and the Indus Valley, and new sessions on ancient Egypt and ancient Greece are in development. Each class will have the session tailored to their needs and pupils can enjoy direct interaction with British Museum staff, as well as high-resolution digital assets such as 3D digital objects being shared with students.

Samsung and the British Museum will also begin to develop an innovative and exciting new strand of programming for teenagers, which young people themselves will help shape. By working directly with teenagers, it will help develop quality programming that fully understands and meets their diverse needs, as well as enhance their experience of the museum’s collection through Samsung technology.

The SDDC provides a state-of-the-art technological hub for children and young people to learn about and interact with the British Museum’s collection through Samsung Technology. Ahead of the refit, the SDDC welcomed its highest ever number of visitors, with 25,000 school children and families using the Centre in 2018/19. Since it opened, 150,000 people have visited the space to take part in a wide variety of activities such as workshops, family drop-ins, and facilitated school visits. This major refit revealed today sees improvements to the user experience to cater to the growing number of visitors, as well as a full upgrade in the Samsung technology available. This will include the Samsung Flip, E-boards and the latest range of Galaxy Smartphones, tablets and smartwatches.

Over the past 10 years, the SDDC has provided the largest program of digital learning activities in any UK museum. It continues to demonstrate the highest levels of audience satisfaction, with 95% of families surveyed in 2017–18 stating they found the sessions ‘good’ or ‘very good’, and that 96% of teachers said they would recommend the SDDC to a colleague and would bring a student group to the SDDC again. Thanks to Samsung’s support, expertise and technology, the SDDC schools and family programs have transformed the Museum’s digital learning provision into a world-class, sector-leading and award-winning program.

Francis Chun, President & CEO of Samsung Electronics UK & Ireland says: “At Samsung, under our global Corporate Citizenship vision of Enabling People and supporting education for future generations, we’re committed to empowering the next generation of innovators to discover and unlocking their full potential. Our collaboration with the British Museum for the past ten years has allowed us to constantly trial new technologies that engage children and young people in innovative ways to not only help them learn about lessons in history, but enable them to better understand the present and prepare for the future. By extending this long-standing partnership for a further five years to 2024, we stand beside the British Museum as we together navigate the ways in which emerging technologies can further enhance the way we learn.”

Hartwig Fischer, Director of the British Museum, says: “We are delighted that thanks to the generous support of Samsung, we can now offer 35,000 school children over the next five years the opportunity to interact with the world-class collection and expertise of the British Museum, who ordinarily might not be able to. Pupils from Andover to Aberdeen and Brecon to Belfast can now experience some of the Museum’s incredible treasures from their own classroom, potentially sparking a lifelong curiosity in the history of the world. The advances in digital technology have enhanced the learning opportunities within – and now outside – the Museum, and the SDDC has been at the very forefront of our efforts to share the collection more widely. We are grateful for the longstanding and continued partnership with Samsung for making it possible.”

For more information about the British Museum Samsung Digital Design Centre: https://www.britishmuseum.org/learning/samsung_centre.aspx

The VMware Cloud Foundation-based rack was built using six Dell R730XD servers, each configured with two Samsung PM1725 NVMe solid state drives (SSDs) as the caching tier and six Samsung PM863 SATA SSDs as the capacity tier. The prototype spans successful imaging and bring-up of the integrated system rack, creation of a workload domain, and deployment of applications within the workload-domain-hosted VMware vSphere® cluster.

“VMware Cloud Foundation is based on VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 with support for all-flash storage and greater data efficiency,” said Raj Yavatkar, VMware fellow, chief architect for VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware. “Our collaboration with Samsung, to combine VSAN with Samsung NVMe SSDs, in VMware Cloud Foundation, brings low latency flash to mainstream applications and makes flash affordable to business-critical applications.”

“Through our strong ongoing strategic relationship with VMware, we are providing the best of both worlds for IT managers by allowing them to quickly build and deploy public and private clouds using the VMware Cloud Foundation combined with our NVMe SSDs,” said Michael Williams, Vice President, Memory Product Planning, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.  “Samsung NVMe SSDs deliver a new level of performance for VMware Cloud Foundation-based systems that is simply not attainable with SAS or SATA SSDs.”

Selected for the caching tier, the PM1725 SSD allows enterprise scale-up storage systems to fully utilize the low latency and extremely high efficiency of the NVMe interface. Based on Samsung’s 3-bit MLC V-NAND technology and the NVMe 1.2 standard, the PM1725 features a native PCIe Gen-3 x8 interface, allowing a single drive to deliver up to one million random read IOPS and 140K random write IOPS, as well as reading sequentially at up to 6GB/s and writing sequentially at 1.9GB/s. The PM1725 can also provide five DWPDs (drive writes per day) of write endurance for five years, allowing it to support write-intensive enterprise caching applications, as well as read-intensive primary storage.

For the capacity tier, Samsung’s PM863 is the industry’s most flexible family of SATA SSDs for servers and storage systems.  The PM863 is available in a wide range of capacities, from 120GB to 3.84TB in a 2.5” 7mm-thick form factor.  PM863 SSDs are powered by Samsung 3-bit MLC V-NAND technology, which ushered in a new era of cost-effective, all-flash, read-intensive storage for SATA-based data centers.

VMware Cloud Foundation brings together the power of vSphere, VirtualSAN, NSX and SDDC Manager into a natively integrated stack that makes it extremely easy to deploy and operate an SDDC, according to VMware. It includes automated installation, configuration and deployment of the virtual infrastructure stack. The automation allows customers to instantiate a cloud instance either as an on-premises private cloud or as a per-tenant cloud instance in a public cloud. It also can reduce the TCO through simplified and automated infrastructure lifecycle management, including day-to-day operations and upgrade/update management.

To find more information about the VMware Cloud Foundation solution and Samsung’s collaborative role, visit www.vmware.com/products/cloud-foundation