News and projects

​May 2019: Casino and Hotel, Biloxi, MS - ~ The property in Biloxi, Mississippi, hosts a 65,000+ square-foot casino with more than 1,500 slots, 50+ table games, a poker room, and a hotel. This customer was looking to update their existing Surveillance system, which was a mixture of ~1700 analog cameras and ~200 IP Cameras on a near-end-of-life digital recording platform. Through an RFP and bid process, ZUVID Surveillance was selected as the Integrator to complete this project. The main priority of the new system was to ensure utmost reliability and redundancy. Anyone in the gaming industry knows that if surveillance is down, the financial impact can be in the millions, and so a highly redundant surveillance system will keep the Casino in compliance. The redundancy starts with a Cisco network that boasts 2 core chassis in 2 physical locations in a VSS (Virtual Switching System) configuration with redundant uplinks from every distribution and access switch. This provides redundant network paths from every switch and redundant routing capability from different physical locations. The 2nd step in the redundancy was to dual record every camera with servers in different physical server rooms. This provided surety that if all servers in a single server room were isolated, the mirror servers and network would continue with 100% coverage and system operation. To curb the high cost of 100% dual recording, High-performance servers and a VMS application capable of > ~1000Mbps throughput was needed. Each server is configured with dual 10 GB fiber optic connections for the record side and dual 1GB copper connections for the client and view side. These High-performance servers, along with the VMS recording service, allow ~350 analog cameras to be recorded per server or ~100 high-megapixel IP cameras without taxing the server and application throughput. The end result is reduced costs by having fewer servers, lower power consumption, and cooling requirements. One of the biggest challenges to upgrading an existing running Casino is the fact that the old system needs to be running 100% to ensure compliance, and the new system has to be built around the old infrastructure, which was built in 1997. Since all new and future cameras are IP, a series of 20+ secure IDF closets were built for cable termination, access switches, and fiber optic cable. Since not all cameras were being replaced to preserve some of the initial investment, over 425 encoders were deployed. Due to the large-scale network and high level of redundancy, a Network Monitoring application was installed to ensure visibility of any issues on the network that might typically not be noticed due to the high level of redundancy. Utilizing SNMP monitoring, environmental conditions like temperature, humidity, and liquid detectors were also monitored, as well as the UPS. A major part of the success of any project of this size and complexity is good communication with the customer and developing a strong relationship with the local technicians, who typically hold tribal knowledge.