Even in the most demanding and critical security environments, like a prison facility, Synology Surveillance Station never fails to deliver. Synology is no doubt our go-to solution for video surveillance for customers large and small.” Christopher Daly-Roy, CEO
The Company
Peachy Event Services started back in the early 2000s and has developed into an installer of CCTV and AV equipment (in both the events industry and doing commercial installation). It also acts as an events hire technical support supplier.
The Peachy team, based in Lincoln and Littlehampton, UK, provides CCTV, live streaming, and AV solutions for numerous events and facilities. The company aims to find solutions where others cannot by relying on their flexibility and ingenuity.
The Challenge
One of Peachy’s longest standing clients is the Lincolnshire Secure Unit, a juvenile prison facility requiring 24/7 closed circuit surveillance. The facility’s six-year-old system needed an upgrade to boost monitoring efficiency, footage resolution, and overall system robustness. The new solution needed to support uninterrupted power supplies (UPS) to keep running during power outages, as well as other redundancy options.
The existing system included two Synology RS3614xs units recording from over 160 cameras, which replaced a pre-2000 analogue solution and have performed immaculately since their installation. However, it still used 720p mpeg cameras, which were insufficient by current standard.
In response to increased complexity in the data streams and device network, the facility flagged three major issues to address: simplifying data streams and live feeds; increasing service uptime with backup recording servers; and implementing central management of the surveillance system, cameras, and monitoring devices.
Having experienced no significant problems with the two original Synology units for over 6 years, the client did not hesitate to deploy additional Synology solutions.
The Solution
The facility’s brand new system takes 167 cameras into six Synology RS3617RPxs units acting as the recording servers, all of which are configured to fail over to a pool of two RS3614xs acting as backup recorders in the event of outage.
A new pair of Synology RS3621xs+ units in a Synology High Availability cluster configuration form the brain of the system, acting as Surveillance Station Centralized Management System (CMS) servers. However, they also perform other important tasks, running a DHCP Server, Docker, Maria DB, php MyAdmin, and Synology Webstation.
The server room relies on a fast Fibre Channel network that is isolated from the camera network to provide Surveillance Station CMS with a throughput of up to 2 Gbps from Surveillance Station, with UPS support for power redundancy. Manual failover is regularly performed to ensure that backup systems would work in case of disaster. Finally, frequent offsite backups of the Surveillance Station CMS configuration are made with Hyper backup and uploaded to Synology C2 Storage.
The Benefits
Lincolnshire Secure Unit’s updated Synology solution provides it with a modern surveillance backbone that features high availability, simple management, disaster recovery solutions, and robust backups.
“Even in the most demanding and critical security environment like a prison facility Synology Surveillance Station never fails to deliver.” said Christopher Daly-Roy, CEO of Peachy Events. “Synology is no doubt our go-to solution for video surveillance for customers large and small.”