BCDVideo Implements Best-Practices Solution for a Texas School District
BCDVideo shows service and support are a win-win.
The Challenge
A Texas school district had existing IT blade servers with networked storage in place. They were committed to making it work for their video surveillance, as they had already invested in the hardware. As they began to implement the solution, it became apparent that their systems wouldn’t work as promised. The ISD covers about 100 square miles, with 45 buildings and a user population of over 35,000. The IT blade servers were in the chassis that share resources for other applications, rather than being an independent platform. This architecture caused a bottleneck within their system and could not provide bandwidth needed for such a large project.
After a year of operation, the school only had about half the buildings operational. Since the school had spent their entire budget, they had to exhaust all available options, including additional funding. Even after that, they still could not even run the access control software properly on their current systems, let alone the video surveillance. They contacted a new integrator for assistance. The integrator saw the need for a new system and called in BCDVideo.
BCDVideo Solutions
After talking with the integrator and the school district, BCDVideo went on-site with all involved and surveyed the area. They was able to examine their network and see where and why the system was sputtering on the bandwidth needs, when it was determined to not be a network issue. A centralized solution was being utilized – thus drawing all the video over the network pipe to the storage array. It was apparent this would never be an efficient implementation for a district of this size. Had the architecture been distributed storage, streamed video would be far less taxing on the system, as the only video streamed over the network was incident video. This causes zero stress to the network, especially one that is 10Gb fibre.
As the school district continued trying to make the best out of their investment, BCDVideo worked with both the integrator and the school to offer a variety of scenarios, including trying to incorporate some of their existing equipment into the solution. BCDVideo walked them through a variety of different options over a year’s time to try to find the best solution for their current and future environment. BCDVideo was also given the opportunity to show the effects of distributed technology and arranged for a number of systems to be used on site for 60 days, which was the school districts standard retention rate. This was prior to SB 507, requiring six months of video/audio storage for special education classrooms.
Results
The school was excited by the ease of use and flawless implementation. After the demo, the school worked to have the BCDVideo named as the sole system provider via the integrator for the district. They used BCDVideo systems exclusively – for less than half the price of their initial expenditure. BCDVideo configured the servers and installed the software which enabled the integrator to deploy the servers quickly and easily.
By moving to distributed architecture with the BCDVideo Nova series video recorders, the district has been running flawlessly since 2014. Only one known system issue—a power supply failed, and was serviced on-site the next morning. As BCDVideo’s recording is optimized for both video surveillance and the OnSSI video management software, the school district has a unified solution that was purpose-built to run together. As for SB 507? BCDVideo’s scalable systems can satisfy this law without needing any additional systems. The school district will not have to worry about their video surveillance for years with BCDVideo’s quality and five-year onsite warranty coverage.
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