Burbank Police Dept. Replaces Analog Media with JetStor RAID Arrays

Often called the “media capital of the world,” Burbank, California, is one of Los Angeles County’s storied cities. “A city built by People, Pride, and Progress” according to its motto, Burbank is home to the headquarters or production facilities of such media and entertainment leaders as Warner Bros. Entertainment, Warner Music Group, NBC Universal, The Walt Disney Company, the Cartoon Network, Viacom, Nickelodeon, and PBS.

The stylish Burbank Police and Fire Headquarters Facility, the police department’s headquarters, is worthy of Burbank, featuring an atrium and a statue of a police officer and firefighter outside.

Enterprise Security designed and installed an IP video storage system in which the Burbank Police Department’s analog video streams are digitized and saved on a JetStor SAS 516iS RAID Array. The security vendor increased the number of cameras to 39 for greater visibility throughout and around the police station.

Rather than intermittently saving video feeds, all of the streams are now continuously stored on the JetStor solution. As a result, the police department has a complete evidentiary record of all activity within its headquarters for investigations and court proceedings. “The practical, economical way to store thousands of hours of video is digitally, but replacing the entire analog video system, including the cameras, would have been expensive,” said Casimir. “Instead, we preserved the existing hardware and replaced the VHS recorders with an IP storage solution.

The JetStor economically archives a year’s worth of video, even though we added additional analog cameras for greater security coverage.” The JetStor array also eliminates the need to manually replace VHS tapes every eight hours and then warehouse them. “The police department went from a very labor-intensive system,” said Casimir, “to one that is fully automated, freeing officers to concentrate on their law-enforcement tasks.”

The decision to retain the analog surveillance cameras and matrix switch meant their video streams had to be converted to digital files for storage on the JetStor RAID array. To this end, Enterprise Security installed five American Dynamics VideoEdge IP Encoders that receive the video from the switch, convert them to digital files, and compress them to conserve bandwidth.

From the encoders, a Gigabit Ethernet switch delivers the digitized video to a Dell R710 server that supports an American Dynamics VideoEdge Network Video Recorder (NVR). The NVR sends the data over gigabit iSCSI links to the JetStor system for storage, as well as provides streaming feeds that officers monitor in real-time. “JetStor solutions are economical alternatives to the products of other storage vendors,” said Casimir. “We’ve long partnered with JetStor and our customers are very happy with its solutions.”

The JetStor array stores over 71 gigabits of digital video every day, and its 27TB capacity ensures a year’s worth of storage. At the end of the year, the oldest files are overwritten with new video data. Additionally, the JetStor system is configured for RAID 5, which uses block-level striping with distributed parity data. RAID 5 protects the police department against data loss while providing high-speed read/write performance. “We use the JetStor GUI RAID manager application to administer the array, but once a JetStor chassis is set up, which is easy to do, it runs transparently,” said Casimir. “Burbank’s JetStor has been rock solid. It simply gets the job done.”

JETSTOR

JetStor meets the evolving needs for data storage, protection, and management. We leverage leading technologies to offer high-value solutions for NAS, SANs, clouds, and hyper-converged infrastructures (HCIs).  Since 1994, our customers have spanned virtually every industry, and range from Fortune 500 enterprises to small and medium-sized firms.  We support environments from data centers and clouds to branch offices and remote sites.