Arena MaxTronic International Co., Ltd.

Efficient museum surveillance is an art
Museums wanting to make use of the latest surveillance systems are with G4S Secure Solutions in good hands. The Rubens House in Antwerp and the Brusselse Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis already knocked on G4S's door. And after equipping the Magritte Museum with an IP system, GS4 started working at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium.

Integrated system combines old and new
Up to now, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts was equipped with a CCTV system with analogue video signal managed by the digital system, using a secured network and full redundant management system. This dated CCTV system with 145 analogue cameras is being dismantled progressively and integrated into a modern IP environment, among other things because a new ‘control room' is being set up. Quite interesting is the fact that those 145 cameras do not have to be replaced, but they can be 'recycled' in the new system.

“For us this is a technological innovation”, says engineer Maarten Lousbergh, head of security and surveillance of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts. "But it is linked to optimisation. Cameras are connected to various kinds of alarms and interfaces link each alarm to the correct action. The NVR system manages it all. If a server goes down, another server will immediately take over all the actions."

Professional, ergonomic infrastructure
The new control room is more ergonomic. "The dispatcher will receive the alarming image centrally on his screen", says Maarten Lousbergh. "It is easy for him to zoom in and do some crowd management. Crowd management is necessary in places where there is a large influx of visitors, where there will be long waiting times, where it is very busy, etc. In the museum this control is needed with exhibitions or when large groups visit the museum."

Special precautions where made for the network and storage, not one single camera may show interruptions in the recording yet using Motion Detection for event trigger and forensic search. To keep the storage for all camera’s including the Megapixel camera’s of the Magritte Museum and during the requested period of time a huge amount of disk space was needed. By using the Maxtronic iSCSI to SATAII Raid (Arena Janus II SS-6603E) configured in RAID6 a fail safe and reliable storage was designed, in addition recording speed was improved and the total amount of space required for the servers and storage devices was reduced from four 19” racks to only one without mentioning the head and power dissipations compared with the previous systems.