City of Long Beach Solves Storage for Its Citywide Video Surveillance

"We have built one of the nation's first and largest wireless camera system infrastructures, using the 4.9 GHz spectrum for all of the cameras. The system has been embraced by patrol officers in the area and has been used in several cases," said Lieutenant Steve Ditmars with the Long Beach Police Department. "Although our camera and wireless system were designed with expansion in mind, we realized only later the large scaling required from a storage perspective. That is why we chose Pivot3. We now have a storage system that can meet our current and future needs at a lower cost. The system was implemented quickly, and, because of its â??pay-as-you-grow' model, it costs us only a fraction of traditional SAN solutions."

The Wi4Net division of CelPlan Technologies was chosen to implement and maintain the City of Long Beach video systems. The cameras capture the video and store it locally on computer hard disks at 30 frames per second. The video is transmitted at six to eight frames per second to the police department's central monitoring hub. Software from Wi4Net partner Insight Video Net LLC (IVN) catalogs the video and carefully preserves it for use as indisputable evidence that is admissible in court if the need arises. The last, but vital element of the surveillance system and an important link in the evidence chain of custody is the high-definition video storage system from Pivot3. The Pivot3 High-Definition Storage Cluster enables the municipality to store hundreds of terabytes of data on a system with unmatched affordability and high reliability.

"In the early stages of implementation, when we only had a handful of cameras, we could get by with direct-attached storage servers," says Jasper Bruinzeel, vice president of marketing and sales with CelPlan Technologies, the company implementing and maintaining the citywide video storage infrastructure. "However, this gave us limited storage capacity and no growth path. With Pivot3, we get superior performance and growth potential from a storage area network at an affordable price. Even though we are cost-conscious with the city's money, we are not compromising a thing to get a great back-end storage solution for all our video. We estimate we will need six terabytes of storage space in the near future, but we expect to grow far beyond this. The Pivot3 system will let us grow capacity as we need it, whenever we need it."

"The Pivot3 storage system can start small and grow incrementally as more surveillance capacity is added," said Jeffrey Bell, vice president of marketing at Pivot3. "The city does not have to pay for excess storage capacity that sits idle long before it is needed. Instead, the network administrator can simply plug in another self-configuring networked storage node (Databank) at any time. Our architecture integrates seamlessly with the Wi4Net solutions that include components from multiple providers."