Gibraltar has had a surveillance system installed covering the city centre and its border with Spain.
It’s a joint deployment of the Digifort security video monitoring platform and CCTV cameras, installed by JT Security. The platform supporting two geographically distinct camera networks, built around UK manufacturer Redvision CCTV’s pan, tilt and zoom (PTZ) and fixed cameras. It includes embedded analytics for live monitoring and forensic search, and a failover system.
What was required
Required were a recording and management platform that could support continuous, high-channel-count operation across two separate sites, with no tolerance for downtime; and cameras able to withstand the Mediterranean coastal and marine setting, while also covering wide-area city centre locations with a different set of operational demands. The delivery window was short. Redvision rovided pre-configuration and technical support.
Servers
The Digifort part of the system is deployed as two live recording servers, one dedicated to the city centre camera network and one to the border security cameras, each able to manage more than 100 recording channels. A single failover server, provides resilience across both sites. Should either live server fail, the failover server takes over automatically, within seconds, with no manual intervention required.
Every channel runs Digifort’s video analytics, generating metadata for retrospective, forensic-level search across recorded footage, as well as live event detection against rules set for specific hot spots. This gives police staff an investigative tool and an active monitoring aid in real time.
CCTV cameras
As for the border cameras, the deployment includes:
– Over 40 X3 Storm 316 stainless steel PTZ cameras: Redvision’s rugged PTZ camera, fitted with wiper, white light and infra-red illumination;
– and VEGA-2052 and VEGA-2065 units, also marine-grade, providing fixed and positional coverage across the border cameras. VEGA-2065 cameras are fitted with wipers and were positioned in locations most exposed to weather.
Meanwhile the town required wide-area overview coverage of busy public spaces, delivered with:
– X3 Storm 316 stainless steel PTZ cameras that can monitor, track and respond to live incidents;
– Knight Panoramic 200: multi-sensor cameras, for single-point coverage of large, complex areas; and
– Knight Scene 80: 180-degree cameras, giving wide-area fixed surveillance at city centre locations.
Delivery
The installer faced a tight timeframe for the project. Redvision’s UK manufacturing base and local stock holding meant cameras could be delivered without the lead times associated with overseas sourcing. Units were pre-configured ahead of dispatch to enable commissioning on site, and Redvision provided commissioning assistance to JT Security to help keep the installation on schedule. Given the sensitivity of border and city centre surveillance data, uptime and data integrity were basics. Each Digifort server is built with RAID redundancy, protecting recorded footage against drive failure at the hardware level. This sits alongside the failover server, which mirrors both live servers and takes over within seconds if either one fails. The resulting system is resilient, protected against drive-level and server-level failure, with no single point of failure across the recording.
Project
Guy Hucker, Sales Director at Redvision CCTV, said: “This was a collaborative project with JT Security from day one. They understood exactly what the border and city centre needed, and that let us focus on getting the right mix of cameras and Digifort’s resilience over to them quickly, pre-configured, with our engineers working alongside theirs for commissioning. It’s the kind of project that shows what’s possible when a manufacturer and an installer are pulling in the same direction under real time pressure.” This project was delivered under Redvision’s Digifort Gold Partner agreement with JT Security, covering the Gibraltar territory.
