Connected Video Surveillance Delivered on Cisco UCS

Cisco Systems, Inc. announced that Cisco Video Surveillance software is available on Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) platform, now in use by more than 11,000 customers.

By virtualizing Cisco Video Surveillance software, Cisco is providing improved levels of performance, scalability, agility and manageability.

Cisco Physical Security solutions enable organizations to transform the way they protect people, property and critical infrastructure. The virtualization of these solutions with Cisco Unified Data Center applications is part of Cisco’s strategy to move toward a solutions-led building block approach for the complete Cisco Physical Security portfolio, resulting in an optimized IP network and Physical Security foundation.

This announcement is the next step in Cisco’s physical security strategy, providing customers with scalability and capacity, lower cost of ownership and simplified management. This news follows the Cisco physical security strategy evolution announced in Fall 2011 which aligned Cisco strengths with market opportunities and customer requirements to focus on large-scale strategic deployments. This provides customers with a combination of Cisco physical security products, services, third-party products and systems, and core networking, data center, video and collaboration offerings to support business needs.

The Video Surveillance Manager on UCS solution represents the first Cisco Video Surveillance Building Block that meets the deployment requirements for large-scale city, transportation, healthcare and energy requirements.

Key Facts:

• Modular UCS platform building blocks support massive scalability increases of up to 1,000 percent versus dedicated server solutions, allowing customers to scale to tens of thousands of cameras, delivering networked video surveillance for commercial, disaster and first responder needs, as well as large events.
• With a new rapid provisioning deployment model for large-scale city surveillance, transportation, critical infrastructure, energy, healthcare and other industries, Cisco Video Surveillance Manager provides centralized management with improved situational awareness and real-time response capabilities.
• UCS Express extends video surveillance as a service on the network as an easy-to-deploy, virtual solution with application consolidation on a blade-form factor for equipment that already exists in many branch offices.
• As part of an end-to-end solution, Cisco UCS offers infrastructure consolidation in the data center with virtualization, memory, provisioning, I/O and management capabilities. Cisco UCS Express integrates the compute platform with all-in-one device convergence to facilitate the extension of data center applications into the branch.
• Management provided by the Cisco Unified Data Center, Unified Management, Unified Fabric and Unified Computing Systems delivers IT agility for provisioning, flexibility and lower operating costs.
• Secure separation capabilities for multi-tenant environments increase logical security and access control.
• Modular, scalable, high-density, and energy efficient, Cisco Physical Security Storage series platforms, as well as storage options from EMC and NetApp, will be available for use with Virtualized Video Surveillance as this solution is extended to the UCS B-Series and C-Series platforms.
• Cisco Capital offers flexible financing offers to streamline the acquisition of Cisco products and services.

Guido Jouret, general manager, Enterprise Video Group, Cisco, said: "Virtualizing video surveillance offers organizations reduced infrastructure costs, faster disaster recovery and deployment, reduced staffing needs and cooling costs, and improved application performance. Our solutions-led building block strategy focuses on virtualizing all Cisco software applications with Cisco Unified Data Center applications to support optimal end-to-end video quality."

Dragisa Lojanica, head of IT, Banka Postanska Stedionica, Serbia, said: "The value of our recent Cisco deployment became evident soon after it was enabled. Cisco experts proved their in-depth understanding of our need to create a modern and efficient security surveillance infrastructure to help ensure that our customers and employees are protected, while streamlining operations, improving business efficiency and cutting costs."

Dave Temple, assistant director of Technology Strategy, Loughborough University, United Kingdom, said: "Cisco Video Surveillance solutions increase our confidence that our students are protected with the highest quality products and support. Loughborough University is actively embracing the cloud model of service delivery using Cisco UCS at the core of its co-operative cloud system. The virtualized deployment model of the 6.3.2 release, based on Cisco’s proven designs for modular building block solutions supported by lifecycle services, will dramatically improve management, scalability, performance and lower total cost of ownership while helping to significantly reduce risks."

Rohan Mendis, telecommunications strategy manager, Transport for Greater Manchester, United Kingdom, said: "Cisco has provided a scalable platform solution to Transport for Greater Manchester, in support of our efforts to provide a safe and secure environment for the travelling public, our staff and visitors to our City. We see the introduction of a virtualised cloud solution as part of the latest Cisco 6.3.2 release as a natural and positive development that will further improve the resilience, availability and cost effectiveness of the existing architecture, and is exciting both for us and for the technology sector as a whole. In our opinion, this approach will reduce design and network risks, improve affordability, and we welcome the scalability and management opportunities for improvement that this change enables."

Availability and price:
Video Surveillance Software release 6.3.2 is available now on UCS Express. The software is scheduled to be available on other platforms including Cisco UCS B and C Series in June 2012. Pricing for the UCS Express-based solution block starts from $2,500.