California Sheriff’s Department Uses Pivot3 Storage Platform To Support In-Car Video Surveillance Infrastructure

  • May 18, 2009

Pivot3 Inc. recently announced that the Placer County Sheriff’s department in California is using the Pivot3 storage platform to support its mobile in-car video surveillance infrastructure. The decision to choose the Pivot3 open-system platform was based on three factors: scalability, ease-of-use and total cost of ownership.

Scalability was a key decision criteria for the county since the system is expected to grow over time, and the county wanted investment protection over the life of the system.

“We first looked at EMC solutions that would only allow only so much capacity before you have to remove the entire logic controller and install a new one,” said Kevin Davis, IT analyst for the Placer County Sheriff’s Department. “With Pivot3, the controller, processor and memory are part of each appliance, not the whole array, which makes expansion very straightforward.”

Ease-of-use was an equally important consideration given the limited resources common to many municipal police environments. It was important that the Pivot3 platform benefits, such as increased availability, bandwidth and scalability, did not require dedicated management personnel, specialized training, or expensive warranty and maintenance contracts.

Proving out the premise that users can install and manage large-scale Pivot3 systems without becoming “storage administrators,” Placer County’s own Davis used the intuitive Pivot3 system to quickly create an array of 36 Terabytes of storage with associated storage volumes for the in-car camera video repository.

“Start to finish, I was done in only a few hours,” Davis said. “Setup was easier than I expected, which allowed us to move on to the real work of monitoring the video we capture.”

Total cost of ownership was another deciding factor during a time of tight fiscal constraints, and, again, the Pivot3 platform offered a strong advantage over competitive options. The Pivot3 platform minimized acquisition costs for Placer County, and the longer-term management and maintenance costs were substantially less as well. In fact, the fully installed Pivot3 solution was roughly one third of the total cost of an EMC Clariion CX310 solution after adding up the warranty, installation and training costs.

“Pivot3 was much more cost-effective than anything else we looked at, and we love the scalability of its clustered storage solution,” said Jerry Silva, IT manager, Public Safety and Criminal Justice Services in the IT Division at Placer County. “Its technology combined with the high interoperability of the system with our existing equipment and software made Pivot3 the perfect choice for our increasing storage requirements.”

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