University of Central Florida Modernizes IT Infrastructure

Campus Achieves Comprehensive Data Protection and Centralized Management for Entire Security and Surveillance Ecosystem with Pivot3 and Milestone Systems

  • Jun 12, 2018

The University of Central Florida has deployed its Pivot3 hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform for more robust video surveillance data protection, improved remote access to sensitive and critical data from any device, streamlined management for all their campus safety and security IT systems, and support for additional datacenter workloads as they grow.

Located in Orlando, Fla., the University of Central Florida (UCF) is one of the largest universities in the country with more than 66,000 students and more than 12,000 employees. It is regularly recognized as one of the best colleges for quality, access, impact and value. U.S. News & World Report recently named UCF as one of the nation’s Most Innovative Colleges for 2018.

Prior to implementing Pivot3, UCF was struggling with the costs and complexity of managing 58 standalone servers, 12,000 individual access points, hundreds of video surveillance cameras, and a diverse range of digital video recorders, or DVRs. The university’s IT organization and security teams required a solution that could easily consolidate these disparate systems, centralize management and provide more effective, efficient and reliable video data storage.

Pivot3 HCI streamlines video management and storage capabilities by hosting the university’s Milestone XProtect VMS, and server and storage management on a single platform. Pivot3 also offers industry-leading resilience — critical in environments such as public universities that have demanding data protection and retention requirements in order to mitigate risk and ensure legal compliance. If multiple hardware failures occur, servers remain online and previously recorded data is protected and available when needed. Pivot3 is also designed to support mixed workloads and can host multiple applications on a single infrastructure, delivering significant return on investment for the university as its security and IT needs evolve.

“We wanted a security solution that specialized in video storage but also offered options to expand into other datacenter use cases as needed, and Pivot3 was the hands-down winner,” said Joseph Souza, assistant director of security for UCF’s Department of Security and Emergency. “During our selection process, both our security team and our IT organization discovered that Pivot3 delivered the best solution for our growing environment.”

In addition to hosting Milestone System’s video management software, Pivot3 also captures and protects video data from 2,500 video surveillance cameras and supports up to three petabytes of storage. Pivot3’s ability to easily scale to this level was a key criterion in UCF’s selection process as its demand for more cameras and video data storage capacity continues to grow. The UCF camera count is expected to rise to over 3,000 when the university’s downtown Orlando Campus opens in the fall of 2019.

“UCF is a leader in educational excellence, and we are pleased to play a role in helping the university protect critical assets and enhance security operations,” said Brandon Reich, surveillance practice leader, Pivot3. “The education market in particular experiences significant benefits and cost savings through the implementation of Pivot3 HCI – not to mention the increased security benefits for students and staff - which reduces complexity and cost, delivers scalability and increases resiliency.”

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