Enabling HD

May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Stephanie Silk

The Chumash Casino Resort, a 200,000-square-foot hotel and casino complex located in Santa Ynez, Calif., a city 35 miles north of Santa Barbara, offers 2,000 slot machines and 44 table games. With each dollar passed and each chip exchanged, a set of high-definition cameras ensures the casino's financial well-being.

In 2004, the casino transformed from a run-of-the-mill building that offered gambling, to the hotel and spa casino it is today. With the additions of hotel rooms and other amenities such as dining services and special events came a new surveillance system from Bosch Security Systems, Fairport, N.Y. (previously reported in “High-Stakes Monitoring,” Access Control & Security Systems, March 2004, which can be found at securitysolutions.com/mag/security_highstakes_monitoring/).

A newer addition to the casino's security efforts is 100 high-definition megapixel cameras from Arecont Vision, Glendale, Calif., focused on security-sensitive locations such as table games, cashiers' windows and kiosks.

This new generation of HD megapixel cameras gives end-users higher picture quality and a better ability to zoom, which makes remarkable details easier to catch. Mark Meske, director of surveillance and compliance at Chumash Casino Resort, says he and other management saw HD cameras at a trade show and were amazed. “We did the research and found that they have six times the clarity of non-HD cameras,” Meske says. But with these features come challenges, because, as Meske points out, “six times the clarity requires six times the amount of storage.”

As the number of pixels increases, as in the case of HD cameras, the amount of storage necessary to hold the data increases. It also requires more bandwidth in order to stream the data onto the viewer.

If a customer doesn't have a large amount of cameras, the process of storing video is simple — video from the cameras is loaded to a server that has local storage. However, according to Lee Caswell, chief marketing officer and a founder of Pivot3 Inc., Houston, a market where hundreds or thousands of cameras are needed, running the system using that model will require thousands of storage boxes that need to be managed one on one. “High-definition is important for casinos not just for efficiency, but for the safety of staff and patrons. [The customer] looks at the quality of HD cameras, wants it, and wants to be able to store for these reasons,” Caswell says. “With this issue, you need a new class of storage that is scalable.”

Pivot3 provides HD storage based on distributed RAID, offering half a petabyte (nearly 500 terabytes) of storage to support the bandwidth and capacity needs that HD cameras require.

The Pivot3 storage is a clustered storage array, which aggregates capacity and bandwidth using the company's RAIGE (RAID across Gigabit Ethernet) technology. “When you have large capacity (big amount of video) and high bandwidth (large numbers of cameras), you want to funnel all your data into storage,” Caswell says.

High-definition storage must be able to scale to petabyte capacities seamlessly, offer massive bandwidth for thousands of cameras and provide a simple management interface that eliminates the need for specialized storage skills and meets the cost-sensitive needs of the gaming markets.

After a two-month trial, Meske and management made the decision to install Pivot3 storage for the 100 Arecont high-definition cameras. “Pivot3 helped us realize our vision of what a surveillance system should be capable of in an open-systems world,” he says.

The improved surveillance system is also capable of a higher storage retention rate. Security at the casino relies on their new HD cameras for tremendous quality and visual acuity.

The recording system for the Bosch cameras in other areas of the casino still has a seven-day retention rate. However, Meske says legal requirements from the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC) requires them to bump up their retention to 14 days minimum for the security-sensitive areas. Pivot3 storage offers this feature, and it's also expandable to 30 days if necessary.

Meske says that it's important to be able to store a large amount of data because casinos face a unique challenge compared to other markets. “Because our operation has to run 24/7, there is no downtime. With other surveillance operations, you can use motion-sensitive cameras to save on storage costs. But at a casino, you must have cameras functioning all the time that are able to store and identify data and be reviewable 15-20 days later,” he says.

In years past, if the casino suspected someone of cheating, the video was open to interpretation because of the grainy analog image the camera provided. However now, with 70 monitors in a 1,500-square-foot monitoring center, the casino's surveillance staff of 15 undercover investigators, 90 uniformed security and a constant rotation of three people operating the room over 24 hours, images can be recalled and examined instantly without question.

Scanning the bank of screens is important for finding disturbances such as spills in the cash cage or potential procedural violations in table games. The staff is trained in all the gaming protocols, so they become experts in what to look for. They also monitor all cash transactions for variances, overages and shortages to prevent internal theft.

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