The project is part of Chicago’s Operation Virtual Shield, which includes one of the world’s largest video security deployments. In collaboration with partners Firetide and Genetec, IBM has deployed the infrastructure build-out for the project. In the first phase, IBM helped the city experts and network engineers design and implement a surveillance strategy infrastructure to capture, monitor and fully index video for real-time and forensic-related safety applications.
This entailed building a fibre network throughout the downtown Chicago area, deploying a critical wireless infrastructure to offer flexibility as required, installing hundreds of new surveillance cameras, linking thousands of pre-existing cameras to the network, and creating a fully redundant back end system to monitor the video, store the images and allow for business continuity and disaster recovery applications.