There have been more and more discussions in both IT and physical security publications around the use of storage technologies in the video surveillance market. The following is a great example of the use of clustered storage for video surveillance applications. It comes from Pivot3, a storage company with a strong customer base in public safety, homeland security, gaming, education, and transportation.  The City of Trenton and the Trenton Police Department in New Jersey are using Pivot3 clustered storage to support two different video surveillance projects.  The implementations illustrate the power of open systems, where two environments with different goals and different video software vendors benefit from the availability, performance and management simplicity of centralized Pivot3 High-Definition storage.

At the Trenton City Hall, the goal was to provide instant access to 30 days of stored video from IP cameras used for general facilities security. The data storage requirements prompted the City to look for a scalable storage solution that provides fast access at a cost point that met both the mandated capacity requirements and the internal budget.

“Storing the video output of our IP cameras resulted in a massive amount of video data that we had to safely store and access when needed,” said Jim Damron, director of IT at the City of Trenton, New Jersey. “Pivot3 solved that issue and gave us a simple path to add more cameras and storage in the near future.  Also, because the storage can work with many different applications and cameras, I was able to introduce the Pivot3 solution to the Trenton Police Department, where we shared a common need for scalable storage, even though our systems are designed to meet different goals.”
 
The Pivot3 High-Definition Storage system provides high availability by clustering storage appliances together to meet the availability, performance and capacity needs of the surveillance user.  The system protects data for the highest reliability environments and can be configured and installed without special training, because it is based on well-known server and network standards.  This standards-based approach allows Pivot3 storage to work as an open-systems component with many different camera, software and service providers.

• Pivot3 High-Definition Storage(TM) Wins Best New Product Award at International Security Conference
• Pivot3 to Showcase High-Definition Storage Solution at ISC West 2008
• Muscogee (Creek) Nation Deploys Pivot3 High-Definition Storage for State-of-the-Art IP Video Surveillance Installation