Qognify, a provider of video and enterprise incident management solutions, has announced Cape May County as one of the first organisations to deploy its Qognify VMS.
Cape May County is the southernmost county in the state of New Jersey. With much of the County along a picturesque peninsula that includes 30 miles of sandy beaches, its 95,000 year-round population swells to almost one million during the summer months. The Cape May County Government is responsible for the operation, safety and security of the County, including sites such as its airport, which is also home to the Department of Emergency Management, the Sheriff’s Department, Superior Court and jail, the Cresthaven Nursing Home, as well as the Cape May County Park & Zoo.
With sites spread out across the County’s 267 square miles, the surveillance challenge was how to manage a growing network of highly distributed surveillance cameras, that are required to be live 24/7, to help keep residents, workers, visitors, the government’s 1,200 members of staff and its infrastructure safe and secure. An added complication was the need for some cameras to be located in rural and low bandwidth areas.
The responsibility falls to the Network Administrator at the County of Cape May, Dan Gilbert. He states: “Every camera needs to be fully operational and recording non-stop, anywhere the public might be, from the play areas in our Zoo to libraries, airports and courts. Our video management system (VMS) is essential to the performance of the entire network.”
Cape May County’s 600 cameras are all IP and predominately from Axis, with a small number from Sony and other manufacturers. These cameras are connected to 11 NVRs and consume in the region of 2.5 petabits of storage, with all footage being stored for a minimum of 60 days.
Qognify has been Cape May County’s video management company for 10 years, Gilbert explains how this long-term partnership began: “We visited a nearby utility company to learn about how it was managing video surveillance and we were impressed with what we saw.” He continues: “The fact that the NiceVision solution was trusted for the surveillance of its nuclear power plants instilled us with the confidence to use the same solution.”
Qognify VMS is designed to meet all the County’s fundamental requirements for a VMS; to easily handle 24/7 monitoring, as well as being simple to manage, maintain and operate. Gilbert notes a big performance advantage of the new system, that has already been deployed across two of the six sites. “One of the biggest advantages that Qognify VMS provides is that we can control everything from a single console. The video configurator, administration and ability to view live video is now all in one place.”
“Qognify VMS operates so smoothly,” comments Gilbert. “It doesn’t matter if you are watching video footage from one day or one week ago. We have ultra-smooth, frame-by-frame, no jitter playback from every camera on the network. It has made a big difference in clarity and picture quality.”
This was amongst the video networks bandwidth challenges, with the County operating an ethernet virtual private line, and bandwidth speeds as low as 20MBPS in some areas.
Given the scale of the County’s infrastructure it has taken a phased approach to upgrading to Qognify VMS, moving site by site. “With the scale of the infrastructure we have, it can feel like we are operating our own small country.” The full transition to Qognify VMS is expected to be completed by the end of year (2022), whilst at the same time the County is increasing the number of cameras in operation.
In the future, Qognify VMS can then provide added functionality that the County may choose to take advantage of such as bi-directional integrations with access control and intrusion detection systems, as well as video analytics. Furthermore, as bandwidth increases across the County, it has the option to store video data in the cloud using Qognify Cloud Bridge, to reduce its hardware footprint.
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