Customer challenge
A Texas school district encompassing about 100 square miles with 45 buildings and 35,000 students needed to update its video storage capabilities. They received a bond in 2011 giving the police department funding to install, and update the school district video surveillance and access control in all of its buildings and facilities.
The existing architecture created a bottleneck within their system. After a year, it was only operational in about half the buildings in the district. Instead of being an independent platform, the IT blade servers were located in the chassis that shared resources with other applications. These servers produced lag time on live videos because overnight archiving routinely overlapped into daytime activity. Schools are learning that they can’t rely on decade-old technology to provide evidence, insight, and protection that meet modern security needs. They contacted an integrator for assistance.
BCDVideo solution
Working with the integrator and school district, BCDVideo went onsite to survey their network. It was discovered that the centralised architecture was responsible for the bandwidth issues – not the network. This type of implementation would never be efficient enough for a school district this large. A distributed storage design is far less strenuous on the system, especially when the only video streamed over the network is incident video. This causes no stress to a 10 GB fibre network.
Optimised for video surveillance |
BCDVideo developed a custom solution, working with the integrator and school district for over a year, using some of the existing equipment. To demonstrate the benefits of distributed technology, a custom-built demo server was used onsite for 60 days. This was used to show the full capabilities of the BCDVideo solution.
Project results
After the demo, the school named BCDVideo its sole system provider via the integrator for the district. They were excited about the ease of use and perfect implementation. BCDVideo configured the servers and installed the software leading to quick and painless deployment from the integrator – for less than half the price of their initial expenditure. Even after adding panic buttons in every office, key card readers, and access controlled vestibules, the school district video surveillance came in under budget on the initial installation. In the end, 1700 cameras were installed throughout the district and have led to many crimes being solved, especially copper thefts. The improved surveillance system also helps district police investigate parking lot accidents, monitor hot areas of the schools, and add evidence to incident reports.
The distributed architecture with the BCDVideo Nova Series video recorders has been running flawlessly since 2014. Optimised for both video surveillance and the OnSSI video management software, the school district now has a unified solution purpose-built to run together. The system’s scalability also satisfies the SB 507 law, requiring six months of video/audio storage for special education classrooms, without needing additional systems. With BCDVideo, the school district video surveillance won’t have to to worried about for years. BCDVideo’s quality and five-year onsite warranty guarantee it.
