Victoria & Albert Museum trusts Wavestore with security system upgrade

The world's leading museum of art, design and performance, the V&A Museum in London, implemented Wavestore’s video recording and management system across their locations. This system not only provided unrivalled surveillance and playback features, but also the ability to fully integrate into existing systems, including dynamic asset tracking and access control.

Situation

The museum had identified the need to upgrade their security system, whilst incorporating already installed systems. The consultant compiled a comprehensive list of requirements for such a system, and then reviewed the recording solutions that were available. After several meetings and demonstrations, where the detailed requirements were addressed with museum management personnel, the Wavestore video recording and management solution was ultimately selected.

Solution

The museum had previously installed access control and other analytics systems, and so the ability to integrate these into the Wavestore design and to provide an uncomplicated, intuitive interface was a major deciding factor. Having a large quantity of cameras and sensors installed, the operator control interface needed to be streamlined and easily manipulated for each situation. This included the ability to manage each individual alarm event from the integrated system, our solution for which has continued to be commended.

Dedicated Wavestore large-storage capacity video servers, were installed and established into a server group, which has since been expanded as the system was upgraded over time. There are now more than 1000 cameras, spread over 4 locations and more than 29 Wavestore servers.

Success

Operating on the Linux platform, Wavestore’s VMS is extremely efficient in the way in which it processes the video data without manipulation or delay. The proprietary design ensures that the data is validated and written to hard disk in a contiguous linear manner, which makes searching and retrieval very quick, is kind to the disk and has the added benefit of there never being the need to defragment the drives.

Another advantage of this particular Wavestore design, is that it does not require additional, separate management servers for failover or user databases. Failover is provided to guarantee a minimum of disruption and recording loss in the event of hardware failure; an absolutely vital requirement when protecting very important and unique artefacts. The Wavestore solution incorporates failover capability in its core application with no additional management hardware required. Should an issue with hardware be detected, a failover server will be operational within a few seconds so that recording will continue.