Dot Hill Systems Corp. today announced that Kern County, California’s Bakersfield School District is using Dot Hill AssuredSAN® Pro 5000 storage arrays to support its district-wide video surveillance system, providing faster video access with near real-time video conversion.
The district’s IP-based video surveillance system collects feeds from 2,000 cameras dispersed across the district, which comprises 158 square miles with more than 28,000 junior high school, middle school, and elementary school students on 43 campuses, plus two administration sites.
Capturing, converting and securely storing the video content presents rigorous storage requirements – combining the need for high-bandwidth, performance-intensive transactions on top of archival requirements. Most cameras record 10-15 frames per second at 640x480 or greater resolution. Video is captured in various native formats from individual cameras and all video is converted to H.264 format, resulting in a 35% reduction in required storage space.
“We needed a modern storage array with outstanding performance to replace the aging system we had that was ill-equipped to keep up with demands,” said Jonathan Foth, network systems engineer for the Bakersfield School District. “The system needed to handle fast transaction workloads consistently and also provide cost-effective archival storage for video files. On this, the Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000 has really delivered.”
Outside of performance, the District has experienced additional benefits including: reduced rack space, reduced power requirements, ease of use and lower rates of storage capacity expansion.
“The Graphical User Interface gives us the ability to see and monitor the performance at each tier,” said Foth. “The product experience out of the box was incredible. The system almost set itself up. The capacity expansion we recently added was surprising simple as well; just connect the chassis, run the wizard and the storage is added to the pool and ready for use.”
