In 2009, when the Grand Casino in Baden in Switzerland upgraded and expanded its video system it chose a Geutebruck high availability IP solution designed by local system integrators Honegger System Technik. It was a design incorporating thirty-five 1.3 Megapixel cameras into the 250-camera system and introducing virtual GeViScope platforms to handle the generated data with ease and efficiency as well as high redundancy. The complex upgrade was made without any interruption to operation of the system or business and has met with the full satisfaction of the casino management.

The Geutebruck IP solution designed and installed by Honegger System Technik exploits two technologies in particular which enable it to handle and store the complete video history from all cameras including megapixel ones at full available resolution for 28 days on a 320 Terabyte instant access database.

The first of these is Geutebruck’s own CCTV-optimised video compression process MPEG4CCTV. This is an MPEG-4 compliant process which uses standard MPEG-4 compression tools in unusual ways for the specific purpose of improving performance and image handling for security users. As a result, systems using MPEG4CCTV are very fast, delivering top quality video images without any perceptible latency; as well as lean and efficient with low network and storage requirements.

The second is the IT technology of virtualization which is used to produce virtual devices. With the aid of Microsoft’s Hyper-V tool, Geutebruck can generate several virtual GeViScope servers on a single piece of hardware. These virtual servers are then linked into clusters with so-called ‘failover’ functionality to ensure that if one of them fails another automatically and instantly takes over without any effect on service.

All data streams are handled by two Intel modular servers, each of which incorporates five high performance computers. Together these run a total of 21 virtual GeViScope video system platforms operated in cluster formation. These virtual GeViScopes record to the high redundancy RAID Level 6 databases mounted on 21 Promise SAS storage systems currently using sixteen 1TB capacity server disks each, but which can take more if needed. Thanks to the high-availability design, if - despite all care and cutting-edge technology – something fails, then the full functionality of the system is re-established automatically without any significant down-time.

The high resolution of the new megapixel cameras provides increased picture quality along with increased security and operational efficiency. The peak resolution support for zooming in for close-ups is used by the supervisors who have 30-inch monitors and access to all of the 250 cameras from each work-station. They can pull up live and recorded footage of identical quality in milliseconds. [www.geutebrueck.com]