A Higher Power
Multi-faceted systems protect schools, temple and students
- By Del V. Salvi
- Aug 01, 2010
The Stephen S. Wise Temple and Schools in Los Angeles make
up one of the largest reform Jewish congregations in the country,
with more than 3,000 member families and nearly 1,700 students.
The temple and schools take security seriously and have
installed a multi-faceted security system to ensure the safety of
facilities, members, students, faculty and staff. The video surveillance
management and control solution manages networked video
from cameras located throughout the facilities and integrates
with the institutions’ physical security information system.
David Lam, the chief information security officer at the temple
and schools, has a background in IT and physical security.
Experience in both disciplines guided his search to find the best
technologies to fulfill the critical need for a highly integrated video
surveillance and security solution. For video management, he
chose a multi-site, multi-server enterprise-scale NVR and camera
management platform.
Lam tapped David Girdner, vice president of Antropy Inc.,
an IT integrator located in Chatsworth, Calif., to assist with the
evaluation process and subsequent upgrade of the facilities’ video
surveillance system. Since 2001, Antropy’s staff has worked
closely with Stephen S. Wise Temple and Schools’ in-house IT
department on special projects.
Girdner said OnSSI’s NetDVMS solution was evaluated,
along with two other IP camera management systems, and selected
based on its lower total cost of ownership, conformity
with IT best practices, compatibility, and simplicity of installation
and operation.
“OnSSI designed NetDVMS from the ground up as an IP system
with advanced video surveillance capabilities,” Girdner said.
“It is designed with the IT environment in mind, unlike other
control systems that evolved from analog video roots.”
Protecting the Temple, Schools
The Stephen S. Wise Temple was founded in 1964 by Rabbi Isaiah
Zeldin and 35 families. Today, the temple encompasses an early
childhood center, an elementary school, Milken Community
High School and David Saperstein Middle School, which was
completed during the summer of 2009. A 24-hour security operations
center watches over the temple and its campuses.
A physical security information management system provides
the front end of the security system. It integrates multiple systems,
from video and analytics to fire, access control and intrusion
detection, tracking workflow and prompting security staff to
take action if an incident occurs. OnSSI is critical to the PSIM,
courtesy of NetDVMS’s ability to interface easily with systems
from other suppliers.
The Wise Temple and Schools run the software on two HP
servers with 16 TB of video storage assigned to the OnSSI system.
Ten cameras run on a virtual server, and another 54 cameras
run on hardware servers, with plans to add more cameras. The
cameras are a mix of domes, box cameras and PTZ cameras.
Lam’s primary concern is perimeter protection. To effectively
monitor the facilities’ extensive perimeter, the system also employs
video analytics from Agent Vi. The PSIM receives data
from multiple systems, processes it and provides operators the
visual information.
“If there’s an event triggered by the content analytics, the system
takes the feed from OnSSI and analyzes it, then alerts the
guard,” Lam said.
For example, the video analytics can detect someone crossing
a virtual boundary at the perimeter of the facilities. OnSSI and
Agent Vi have collaborated to integrate the advanced content
analytics capabilities, enabling Lam’s security staff to intelligently
review video, ensuring that they see what they need to see,
when they need to see it. As a result, fewer people are needed to
effectively monitor more locations, greatly reducing operational
costs while improving security.
Looking Back
The temple and schools also use Ocularis Client Lite software,
installed at the operations center and the IT department, for forensic
analysis of incidents.
“When the school needs more granularity in searching video,
they turn to the software’s investigation tools,” Lam said.
Features include simultaneous playback of up to 64 cameras,
highly configurable motion detection, incident search by time and
alert, a kinetic timeline for reviewing large volumes of video and
auto-generation of thumbnails based on time and motion.
In addition, the software offers instant investigation capabilities
during live monitoring, including playback, digital PTZ and
optical PTZ, as well as automatic, on-event push-video alerting.
Once an incident is accessed and investigated, video can be exported
for court evidence in multiple formats, including multicamera
video database.
“Part of the beauty of the NetDVMS system lies in its ability
to integrate with multiple systems,” Lam said. “It is a very open
system. We had no problem integrating analytics, and we can
switch cameras whenever we want to. It works with the products
I want it to work with."
This article originally appeared in the August 2010 issue of Network-Centric Security.
About the Author
Del V. Salvi is a freelance writer based in New York.