Visual Management Systems and Veracity to Help Shannon Airport in Ireland

Visual Management Systems Ltd and Veracity UK Ltd announced an installation of its Coldstore surveillance storage system at Shannon Airport that is helping to improve the reliability of CCTV recording while reducing rack space, power and cooling.

Shannon Airport is the third busiest airport in Ireland welcoming 1.715 million passengers in 2015.  The terminal opened in 2000, has 40 check-in desks, 5 baggage carousels and 14 boarding gates with nearly 20 aircraft parking stands. The airport has had a long-term relationship with Visual Management Systems, a Physical Security Information Management (PSIM) solution provider that integrates and manages some of the world’s largest and most complex security systems in airports, military bases, museums, city centres, national borders, retail malls, oil and gas assets and critical national infrastructure.

Over the last decade, Visual Management Systems has helped Shannon develop an integrated security system including over 200 CCTV cameras, 70% of which are mega-pixel HD cameras alongside a host of integrated facility management systems. Following a recent upgrade from analogue to digital HD CCTV technology, Visual Management Systems and Shannon Airport needed to revaluate how sensitive and critical security video is viewed, analysed and retained.

John Francis, security manager, Shannon Airport, explained: “The move from our legacy CCTV to the new AXIS HD cameras enhanced our security surveillance capability, but also led to a massive increase in capacity for our video storage along with greater performance requirement. The old NAS boxes, although adequate for the old analogue system, were also starting to show their age which prompted us to revaluate and select a better long term video storage platform.“

With limited rack space within its comms room and a need for high throughput, continuous writes along with reliability, Visual Management Systems and Shannon Airport began to examine a number of options.

Jay Shields, MD, Visual Management Systems, explains: “In this type of scenario where CCTV reliability is critical, Coldstore is a particularly good fit and the high density, low power consumption appliance provides a number of additional benefits.“

Coldstore is a NAS system designed for video surveillance systems requiring long duration archives with the highest levels of reliability. The Linear Array of Idle Disks (L.A.I.D) technology combined with Sequential disk Filing System (S.F.S) offers a 90% power saving versus RAID with much higher reliability, and a lossless failover technology that removes the need for time-consuming rebuilds of failed drives by instead utilising an instant hot swap disk technology. Offered as a 3U high, 120TB unit that uses 0.5W/TB, Coldstore will also extend the life of HDD drives, reduce the levels of air-conditioning required in the server room and cut the cost of backup UPS.

Coldstore integrates with TITAN VISION, the PSIM from Visual Management Systems, an open standard, multi-vendor capable PSIM running at Shannon Airport. TITAN VISION controls multiple disparate security systems including video surveillance, access control, video analytic intrusion detection, fire and safety and building management. The PSIM also offers the capability for immediate DR, BC and redundant operation. This includes backup systems such as servers, databases and network for automatic transfer of control room operation.

The installation and configuration carried out by Visual Management Systems has enabled 5 Coldstore appliances to record video footage from over 200 cameras including HD and analogue with absolute reliability. The implementation of over 300TB with the potential for a further 300TB future expansion has reduced the required rack space by 40% and power consumption by 70%, including a reduction on the workload of attached HVAC systems within the comms room.

“TITAN VISION and Coldstore have easily met and surpassed our expectations,” says Francis, “the additional features such as the ability to swap-out disks whenever we need, and no data loss on disk failure are key for us and ensure that we are able to deliver a reliable and scalable storage environment suitable for all our security video requirements.“