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Paul McCartney of British legendary rock band The Beatles has launched its digital music library on a private cloud.

McCartney's digital music migration project was first announced in September last year. The plan was to work with HP to digitize the materials, then design and build a content management system to make portions of them available to fans of McCartney.

McCartney's collection currently comprises more than one million items. They include photographs, video footage from live concerts, film rolls, videotapes and reels, music recordings, original art works and memorabilia. HP today announced that all of these assets are now digitized for the private cloud-based digital library.

The library is built on the HP Converged Infrastructure, which is based on modular building blocks of HP servers, storage, networking and management software. The assets are housed in a private cloud managed from HP commercial data centers.

According to MPL Communications, McCartney's media company, it used to be a "complex and time-consuming process" to find specific assets from McCartney's collection in the previous technology infrastructure.

With the new HP Information Optimization solution, it now benefits from an optimized content repository, allowing MPL Communications to access the needed information quickly on demand.

McCartney said, "It's really exciting because even if I'm out on tour anywhere in the world, I will be able to say, okay, 'Wings 1976 tour' and instantly, it will come up. You've got all the information, all the photos from it. And you'll have written accounts -- personal accounts and critical accounts -- of what happened." 

MPL Communications uses HP's hybrid delivery solution which consists of an off-premise, cloud-based model, combined with the company's redesigned and expanded on-premise IT infrastructure. The company's refreshed data center infrastructure uses HP BladeSystem Matrix, HP ProLiant servers, HP StorageWorks and HP Networking solutions as its core foundation. 

MPL Communications will house a copy locally of the digital library to reduce the organization's dependence on the speed of the local telecommunication system to upload or download assets from the private cloud. HP will maintain a redundant system in a remote data facility, with a full replication of the digital library.

The private cloud approach is said to enable MPL Communications to extend its business operations beyond its data center in London, and protects the library from the risk of natural disaster or unexpected downtime.