Volume 4
May 2016 Edition
Sharing
camera feeds has
been a valuable
yet easy-to-integrate solution
that each city
has eagerly installed.”
The Solution
The municipalities, working with the integrator, chose a common open-platform
VMS that allows each city to individually monitor and secure its
own assets, be it a government building, transit station or cityowned business. The open platform enables each city to design
and install the hardware and software that meets its own needs,
providing a flexible solution that can also be shared across locations to leverage more resources.
The VMS software chosen was XProtect from Milestone Systems
with the XProtect Smart interface, remote Web Client, and Milestone Mobile client for video sharing on-the-move. This serves the
core needs of each municipality but offers versatile feature sets
and client interfaces that address the unique needs of each department. With the success of the initial video installation, Pro-Tec
began expanding into additional applications, such as integration
with a point-of-sale system for government-owned retail stores.
No other software is used. With the VMS system now in place, the
cities are saving money by efficiently deploying emergency services, knowing exactly what they are dealing with before sending
out large first responder teams.
Mainly Axis cameras were used for the implementations. “Over
time, we have developed a checklist with more than 20 points we
use to evaluate the technology partners we work with. Axis consistently has one of the highest quality products we have seen on
the market. The sub-5 year failure rate is next to none and technical support staff is very reachable,” says Tim Ferrian.
Video storage is handled several ways: Pivot3 was a big part of the
equation during the first years of the implementation, and are still
managing 300+TB of storage on city arrays. Over time, some cities
have moved to
other options
for
storage
such as Iomnis for many
implementations.
Each
city
views
their
video
independently of
one another. There is a central place called the Regional Traffic
Management Center (RTMC) operated by the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MNDOT) that views all of the cameras
(700 or so) on the highways and freeways. They offer video feeds
to many of the cities for the cameras that are located in their ju-
risdiction. The City of Minneapolis Emergency Operations
Centerviews 800 cameras installed by Pro-Tec Design on all
the intersections and public areas.
SPRAWLING METROPOLIS
Minneapolis/St. Paul make up the most populous area in the
state of Minnesota—a sprawling metropolis with a population of more than three million people. About 10 years ago,
when the industry began widely adopting IP technology in
surveillance environments, Pro-Tec saw an opportunity to
extoll the virtues of IP security technology, while also helping cities solve problems that developed with the use of outdated analog systems.
This was not a fad to Tim Ferrian, who saw the shift to IP
surveillance as the obvious path for systems in the future.
Pro-Tec’s relationships with many cities in Minnesota developed from a foundation of card access control and video
surveillance, so
a transition into
network-based
surveillance that
could integrate
the two was a
logical next step.
A RING
OF
PROTECTION
Pro-Tec developed the idea for a collective solution between municipalities
based on a standardized IT backbone. With each area using
the same platform, it would maintain its own system yet open
up the option to share video feeds in case of an incident
or emergency that crosses town borders. In addition, with a
combined VMS service, updates and maintenance would be
streamlined for quick response.
“We began working individually with the cities and now assist
quite a few—three more have signed on as we moved into
2015,” Ferrian said. “The agencies own and operate each
individual system, but if there is any incident where a neighboring town is also using the same platform and needs help
in an emergency, it is convenient and expeditious if the other
organizations can step in with their own camera feeds.”
There are many common themes within city surveillance:
Watching out for the visitors of city halls, keeping track of
persons in custody at police stations, providing evidence for
investigations, protecting staff and equipment, monitoring
community pools to protect the government from any liability
and watching intersections for public works operations (moving snow, salting roads), among numerous other functions.
With these commonalities, each city also has unique needs
for surveillance whether they are monitoring a busy farmers’
market, senior centers, community sporting events, historical landmarks, water treatment facilities, water towers and
many others.
Eight cities surrounding Minneapolis were currently linked at
the end of 2014 via the VMS solution developed by Pro-Tec
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