Bakersfield School District Opts for Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000

Dot Hill Systems Corp. announced that Kern County, CA’s Bakersfield School District is leveraging its AssuredSAN Pro 5000 storage arrays to support its district-wide video surveillance system, providing faster video access with near real-time video conversion, resulting in reduced storage costs and more efficient archiving.

Founded in the 19th Century, the school district today is leveraging 21st Century technology to ensure its students have a safe learning environment. 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 2 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 640×480 or greater resolution. Video is captured in various native formats from individual cameras and utilizing the capabilities of the AssuredSAN Pro 5000, all video is converted to H.264 format resulting in a 35% reduction in required storage space, reducing the cost of archived video that is stored up to 30 days.

Using the hybrid SSD and HDD SAN storage system, a AssuredSAN Pro 5000 delivers the requisite performance profile needed. A ‘seriously smart’ storage offering with built-in intelligence that responds to data access needs without human intervention or policy settings, the Pro 5000 Series is an integrated storage offering that delivers faster access to current data with built-in, real-time autonomic tiered storage and virtualization, supporting rapid access to the current surveillance video most in demand – even as that demand changes minute by minute.

“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, 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 GUI 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.“

“You could definitely say there’s a tremendous amount of data conversion taking place within the Bakersfield School District – both from teachers to the minds of students, and from video cameras to servers,” said Joe Swanson, VP marketing and business development, Dot Hill. “The Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000 uniquely manages the high demand storage requirements of large video surveillance applications such as this one with the ability to dynamically convert video into lower resolution formats for more efficient cost effective archive storage without compromising the immediate need for high resolution video ‘on demand’ when security events occur. The typical storage array is not designed to handle these dynamic requirements. However, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 is ideal for these types of video surveillance virtualized environments, providing 99.999% availability, and easily accommodating the multiple random video streams produced by the district’s video data conversion.“