Irish Prison Service Selects Scality, Ctera and HPE Storage Solutions

Using storage solutions from Hewlett Packard Enterprise , Scality SA, and Ctera Networks, Ltd., Irish Prison Service preserves HD surveillance video for incident investigation, which is critical to ensuring the safety of staff and prisoners.

This end-to-end solution delivers strong security with massive scalability and high efficiency to manage this critical video data over many years, and systematically deleting old data when allowed by law and policy.

The wings of any prison may seem like an intimidating space. However, Irish Prison Service strives to make it as safe and secure as possible for staff and prisoners. The service cares for prisoners with dignity and oversees their rehabilitation to help build safer communities upon their release. All this requires highly trained, skilled professionals. But it also takes technology.

Video surveillance is fundamental to ensuring the safety and security of prisoners and staff across Ireland’s 12 prison facilities.

The Irish Prison Service operates approximately 5,000 cameras continuously recording the movement and actions of everyone in the facilities, and any incidents captured on video serve as crucial evidence for investigating an incident. In fact, under Irish Prison Service policy, video footage of incidents must be stored for four years and one day – the video can only be deleted after that exact period of time and only then if the case has been resolved.

The prison service had been storing incident video on a traditional storage array since 2008; however, it had never been deleted. The service lacked the visibility and a technical process for securely and systematically deleting video, and over so many years, the storage array was running out of capacity. Moreover, the prison service upgraded its surveillance infrastructure with new HD cameras to enhance the visual quality and intelligence of footage to further improve the safety and security of its facilities. That meant larger video files, and even more storage demands.