Archiving Security
When moving to a new headquarters four times larger, the School of Information and Communication of the University of the Republic of Uruguay in Montevideo needed to implement a video surveillance system that provides high quality, reliability and accessibility
- By Courtney Dillon Pedersen
- Mar 01, 2018
The University wanted to implement
a robust VMS with good
video storage capacity that
included alarms and notifications
for motion detection or
perimeter crossings in order to control potential
external and, most importantly, internal
theft. It was essential to integrate the system
into an existing network infrastructure
to meet the established budget that did not
include new coaxial cable installations.
The Existing Infrastructure
The school and security integrator decided
on Milestone Systems XProtect Professional
VMS software plus cameras from Digital
Watchdog DWC-PB2M4TIR and Vivotek
IP9181-H.
School security staff wanted a versatile
and easy to install in a virtual computerized
system. It does not require dedicated equipment
(standard IT hardware works fine) and
the interfaces and access levels allow the user
to easily implement an optimal monitoring
center. The alarm panel provides quick
identification of events and sends night-time
alerts via SMS to the mobile number designated
for each shift.
The administration of the system is simple
and it comes with XProtect Smart Client,
a display interface that works in desktops or
Milestone Mobile that manages video from
smartphones and tablets. Milestone allows
the integration of cameras from a very wide
range of manufacturers and offers a complete
metric analysis.
Early in 2017, the School of Information
and Communication (FIC) was inaugurated
at the University of the Republic of Uruguay
(Udelar). The university’s website announced
that the new headquarters aimed to strengthen
the core mission of the school created in
2013. It regained a large space that went unused
for decades and part of the senior living
facility, Asáma Dámaso Antonio. It is
a structure of 8,500 square meters and four
floors that house nearly 4,000 students, 200
teachers and 80 administrative and logistics
staff on a daily basis.
Inside the Building
In addition to classrooms and administrative
offices, there is a large and modern library,
audio and video recording rooms
and an advanced television studio. With
the presence of such modern technological
investments in the property, the concern
about theft and damage increased, due to
the high traffic of faculty, students and visitors
that could access the control and monitoring
of the equipment and devices.
“The new headquarters greatly increased
the vulnerability points for security,” said
Yonathan Benelli, IT manager at Udelar.
“Without a system like the one now implemented,
it would be unfeasible to maintain
an acceptable level of security.”
Benelli adds that despite the need for a
professional video surveillance system for
the educational institution, “It was unthinkable
to carry out a CCTV installation with
coaxial cabling due to its high cost. Therefore,
the installation of the Milestone IP video
management system within the existing
IT network infrastructure versus performing
a coaxial interconnection resulted in a very
significant cost reduction.”
The savings were not only in technology
acquisition, but also in hardware and human
resources.
“We estimate that without this system, we
would have needed at least four added employees
dedicated to surveillance. Also, we took
advantage of existing hardware to implement
virtualization,” Benelli said.
A Custom-made Solution
Foxsys, the company managing the technology integration for this project, proposed
the implementation of Milestone’s XProtect
Professional solution. It is an open interface
application designed for IP video management
software with easy, intuitive and powerful
functions.
The Smart Client interface has advanced
search tools that combine with an easy-tonavigate
video timeline, allowing users to
quickly and accurately examine events. It
also offers sophisticated export options, including
the Storyboard feature, which helps
consolidate relevant video evidence to gain a
complete view of incidents.
“The software was selected because of
the systems notifications which were important
in this application,” said Juan Martín
González, commercial director of the integrating
firm.
He said the solution was complemented
by two virtual machines that operate on an
HP server and are managed by the software
Promox, which proved highly reliable. Digital
Watchdog cameras were used.
“In particular, the DW cameras allowed
us to have a 180-degree panorama of
some specific areas and other cameras were
extremely useful because Milestone recognizes
the algorithms of crossing a perimeter
line that run in the camera,” Gonzalez said.
“From there, we fed the alarm panel, thus
reducing the need for central processing.
For the communication, a data network was
implemented on Cat 6 UTP and HPE POE
1920 switches. In terms of storage, we used
the NAS QNAP brand with eight bays of
4TB each, implementing a raid 5 for more
protection and writing speed. We were surprised
how well Milestone worked on a Proxmox
virtual machine.”
Countless Advantages
and High Satisfaction
For the administration of the system in general,
twelve people were trained over two days.
“Everyone quickly understood XProtect
Smart Client despite having little previous
experience—some had worked with
a rudimentary analog solution before. The
system operators were very satisfied with
the interface and its excellent performance
in terms of quality and frames per second,”
González said.
For the institution, the advantages of this
implementation are numerous. Benelli indicated
that the virtualization implementation
allows them to immediately have a copy of
the server data at the moment a network failure should occur, minimizing the loss of security video and avoiding
hours or days waiting for the replacement of hardware or software.
The benefits, as Benelli points out, are countless and include: the
capacity to manage multiple cameras simultaneously; comprehensive
remote monitoring; end-user event search functionality; more advanced
recording and navigation settings; easier role definition and
permissions management of user accessibility.
“The implementation was a success in every sense, not only from
the point of view of the service provided by the system,”
Benelli said “But also by the guidance, suggestions
and labor that the company provided beyond
the installation and configuration, in which all the
required and additional goals were met.”
This article originally appeared in the March 2018 issue of Security Today.