Securing A City Within A City
Enhanced security services are one of many amenities in NYC town
- By Craig Albrecht
- Mar 01, 2012
Chances are if you’re in the Big Apple, you’re aware of the massive
presence of the 80-acre sprawling “City within a City” on the
Lower East Side. With 110 residential towers, Peter Cooper Village
Stuyvesant Town (PCVST) is truly the equivalent of a small
city, housing more than 30,000 residents in some 11,250 one- to
five-bedroom apartments. The campus features parks, athletic courts, a seasonal
greenmarket, free music and countless other amenities.
Protecting this magnitude of sheer space, residents, visitors and employees is
no easy feat. Rose Associates, the manager for PCVST, recognized this and selected
Security Management Systems Inc. (SMS) to design-build a comprehensive
enterprise solution, keeping in mind the complexity involved in the integration as
well as post-project serviceability and management of the final product.
The ultimate solution includes a complete integration between subsystems
that otherwise would be individual solutions. SMS deployed AMAG Access
Control, Verint Nextiva surveillance, Commend VoIP, more than 1,100 interior
and exterior cameras, and 960 access control points, including a partitioned
database that functions seamlessly with SKIDATA gates to authorize residents
with permission to use the facility’s six garages.
And to manage all of this, an intuitive user-friendly graphical user interface
(GUI) is behind a powerful around-the-clock command center.
Key Challenges Overcome
This project presented two challenges: power and lack of existing infrastructure.
SMS solved both. A battery-based solution was determined to be unfeasible due
to the limited amount of space in each of the buildings to accommodate the system;
instead, SMS designed an innovative, low-voltage power and data grid to distribute power from 35 fused distribution
panel locations. Every building
houses a custom distribution frame
where camera, lock and UPS power
are terminated, powered by this lowvoltage
grid.
Driven by Technology
The complex has five security technology
hubs, each equipped with APC/UPS
backup power, camera encoders, video
servers, analytics and an aggregate of
360 terabytes of video storage distributed
accordingly.
Anyone in technology can tell you:
bandwidth is crucial when managing
hundreds of cameras streaming across
any network. Having on staff Cisco
Certified Engineers, SMS distributed
the solution across 56 3,750-catalyst
switches with five 4,500 supervisor catalyst
switches, enabling gigabit bandwidth
at every edge switch.
The network provides resiliency
and redundancy to every edge switch
having dual uplinks and diverse paths
to sustain a network failure and redirect
using the fail-over link in case of
an outage. The architecture is utilized
across all major security hubs, having
diverse fiber paths. Spare fiber strands
are available for future upgrades and
expansion.
High Security, Underground
PCVST has six tenant and visitor parking
garages. A major challenge was
to integrate the parking management
system with AMAG Access Control
to manage access for tenants and visitors
while maintaining seamless system
functionality. Tenants who subscribe
to the parking services can gain access
by scanning their ID cards through the
HID Long Range Readers, which are
positioned at the entry and exit points
of each garage. The garage operator is
provided with a workstation that allows
him or her access to the tenant parking
portion of the database with tenant
information for validation and assistance
in billing, while security has an
overview of the entire solution on one
integrated system.
A Commanding
Security Center
As an integral part of the solution, the
impressive new command center can be
seen through a massive window in the
management office lobby, providing every
tenant and visitor assurance of the
high level of commitment to security
and safety. The command center brings
situational awareness to the security officers
who are deputized by the NYPD.
The fully custom-designed Winsted
console is divided into three geographic
areas, with all alarms automatically
routed to the designated review workstation
for their respective coverage
while a fourth receives alarm events
from the entire campus as a “catch-all,”
providing a level of redundancy and
ensuring every alarm is answered.
AMAG’s Symmetry graphical user
interface enabled SMS to create customized
maps of the PCVST campus,
allowing security officers to view a section
of the campus or drill down to
view a select area or building. As the
images are presented in the Symmetry
system, security officers can decide how
to respond via the graphical map interface,
eliminating the need for officers
to memorize the camera numbers or
locations and improving response time.
When an alarm occurs, associated cameras
automatically begin recording the
area at a higher frame rate. The camera
view(s) automatically pop(s) up on the
monitor, allowing security officers to
view all of the cameras associated with
the alarm event and make assessments
based on the alarm.
“Nextiva analytics is deployed on
many cameras for enhanced situational
awareness onsite,” said William Eckard,
director of enterprise sales and
strategic accounts for Verint.
Real-Time Network Mo nito ring
and Managed Services
Managing and maintaining thousands
of security network nodes is certainly
not an easy task. Having certified
members across technology as well as
physical security, SMS monitors and
manages the Stuyvesant Town development
at its Security Network Operations
Center (SNOC) in Great Neck,
N.Y. The system is designed to monitor
the entire physical security network infrastructure,
including but not limited
to disk space utilization, CPU, network
traffic, disk failures, system outages
and network availability, as well as core
application services such as AMAG
and Verint.
The system tracks more than 20
different metrics across each machine
to ensure everything is running
smoothly. The end result is the highest
level of system availability with the
capability to detect, determine, and in
many cases resolve service issues automatically
before the client knows
there’s an issue.
“This successful implementation
could only be achieved by a few system
integrators in the business,” said Matt
Barnette, AMAG Technology senior
vice president of sales and marketing.
“This site is one of the more impressive
installations I have seen and is an
example of what can be accomplished
when executed with precision.”
This article originally appeared in the March 2012 issue of Security Today.