Colorado School District Expanding IP Video Surveillance
School District 51, Mesa County Valley, in Grand Junction, Colo., first began using OnSSI's open-architecture, intelligent IP-based video surveillance software five years ago in a test system incorporating 25 cameras at a single middle school.
Since then, the K-12 school district has expanded the system to include a total of 256 cameras at 25 sites, all providing images to five video servers using OnSSI software at the district office. The flexibility and scalability of the OnSSI system has facilitated system growth to accommodate the expanding recording needs and available budget of the western Colorado school district that serves 22,000 students and has more than 2,900 staff members.
“The OnSSI system has expanded with our recording needs as we have added more schools and cameras,” said Steve Tobin, senior systems administrator at School District 51. “It's very easy for end-users to view live and archived recording. The client software is easy to install, and since its Active Directory (AD) was integrated, we spend almost no time managing the software.”
Tobin noted that the Mesa County Valley school district finds it useful that OnSSI software can easily export individual or multiple cameras to a single recording. Also, because licensing fees are based on cameras rather than servers, the server base can be expanded without incurring extra cost.
Each Mesa County Valley school can view live or archived security footage from their school only. If a recording is needed, the district provides a CD of the requested footage, and SATA storage devices attached to servers at the district office preserve two weeks of video.
“A networked video system should help administrators and educators keep and access video, and it should filter and process that video to make it more useful," said Gadi Piran, president and CTO of OnSSI. “For Mesa County Valley schools, and for many other districts of all sizes, IP-based video allows administrators to combine real-time response with powerful capabilities to investigate incidents after the fact."
Mesa County Valley schools are located on 42 geographically independent sites. Future expansion of the system to other locations will depend on school budgets and needs. The district is well prepared for system growth based on their experience so far: An integrator, ISC of Casper, Wyo., was used for the initial purchase five years ago, but since then the district has used contractors to add new cameras and has installed the software themselves.