Municipal Utility Powers Up Infrastructure Security With IP Video Upgrade

  • May 01, 2009

Intransa recently announced it has been selected by Garland Power & Light, a Texas municipal utility, to upgrade the company’s surveillance systems for physical infrastructure protection.

Since 1923, the City of Garland has been providing electric service to its citizens through Garland Power & Light, a locally owned and controlled not-for-profit municipal utility. With nearly 68,000 customers, GP&L is the third-largest municipal utility in Texas and the 41st largest in the nation.

GP&L needed to expand and enhance video surveillance protection of its wide-raging infrastructure and facilities, well beyond the capabilities of the existing IP-based CCTV system.

“The IP surveillance system is a major component in our ability to monitor and protect our critical infrastructure,” said David Grubbs, GP&L’s Regulatory and Compliance Director. “The Intransa Video Data Management and Retention platform provides scalable capacity that will allow our new surveillance solution to cost effectively meet our objectives, now and in the future.

“Because of the design of the Intransa System, we have been able to meet the bandwidth requirements of a large number of cameras recording continuously as well as vast storage capability to meet our storage requirements of up to 90 days of recorded video.”

GP&L has an extensive and widely dispersed infrastructure, and wanted to improve image quality, increase coverage, and extend video retention capacity for its video surveillance system.

The utility has three gas-fired generating plants with a total of 640 megawatts of generating capacity, supported by a transmission system of 23 substations and 133 miles of transmission lines. In addition, the City of Garland is a partner in the Texas Municipal Power Agency, which operates the 462 megawatt coal-fired Gibbons Creek Power Plant. GP&L’s energy distribution system has 1,007 miles of overhead lines and another 1,000 miles underground.

Preferred Technology Solutions, a member of the Intransa StorPartner integrator and dealer program, architected a complete solution for GP&L, providing Axis Communications megapixel cameras for greatly improved coverage and higher image resolution. Eventually, more than 300 IP cameras are envisioned for complete video coverage to meet GP&L’s requirements.

“Working with Intransa, we have integrated the three brands of previously installed IP cameras and are able to utilize the newer technologies and cameras as they become available,” Grubbs said. “We are impressed with the ease of expanding the system and are already beginning the next phase expansion of the storage system.”

The Milestone XProtect Enterprise Video Management System, running on a commodity server, provides a new level of video management and control to meet GP&L’s needs for both live stream monitoring and video archiving capabilities. Milestone Systems and Axis Communications products are among the more than 150 physical security, imaging, and technology solutions that have been certified for risk-free integration by the Intransa StorAlliance Technology Labs.

Supporting the new video surveillance system is an Intransa BuildingBlock Security-Grade Video Retention platform. Intransa BuildingBlock can scale from as little as 6 Terabytes of nonstop video retention and instant playback. Additional capacity and performance can be modularly added, without ever halting recording or playback, providing for years of retention capacity of 1,500 Terabytes or more.

The fault-resilient Intransa BuildingBlock platform delivers advanced RAID protection to eliminate the risk of lost video that plagues analog CCTV environments. Hot-swap technology provides nonstop recording, with unattended operation supported by e-mail alerts, without the need for downtime for maintenance. Access to both live and recorded video, as well as to system admin tasks, can be performed when needed from any authorized location with IP access, providing increased flexibility and reduced administration for GP&L.

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