Nottingham City Transport Deploys QStar Archive

QStar Technologies, Inc. announced that Nottingham City Transport (NCT) has deployed its HSM software to archive CCTV content taken from its fleet of more than 300 buses as part of the ‘Safety and Respect for Transport’ campaign designed to create a ‘safer and friendlier’ environment for bus passengers. The QStar HSM software is at the core of NCT’s archive workflow that includes CCTV content collection, processing and preservation.

CCTV systems are used to monitor activity in and around the NCT buses while in service. When an incident is reported the relevant footage is collected and processed by licensed NCT staff, and then turned into evidence packs which are submitted to the police and/or insurance companies. All processed evidence is archived on a 5TB Blu-ray optical library from DISC using the QStar HSM software running on a Windows server.

The QStar HSM software presents the Blu-ray library as a virtual file system, providing a transparent interface to the NCT content management administrator. The HSM solution also offers offline media management, allowing NCT to cost-effectively expand its archive capacity outside the library as content increases and ages, and to create duplicate Blu-ray media for very affordable offsite disaster recovery.

"We chose the QStar HSM software and Blu-ray library because we need to maintain secure access to our archived evidence packs for an average of six years and this configuration gives us the peace of mind that our data is safe and available," explains Dave Tucker, CCTV coordinator at NCT. "This solution allows us to meet our authenticity and retention requirements in a very cost effective way. The QStar archive offers us much greater flexibility than a NAS RAID system and is so easily scalable that we can incrementally expand archive capacity in the future."

"I regularly interview many of our customers and I was really impressed with NCT’s archive strategy," commented Steve Tongish, global marketing director for QStar. "The team has deployed a simple, yet effective archive with well-defined policies and procedures for the collection and preservation of sensitive CCTV content. I believe that NCT has established a very high standard for any European public sector organisation that must balance the needs of the local community with the realities of insurance and law enforcement. We are very pleased to play an important role in NCT’s efforts to improve the experience and safety of its passengers."