There is a data center twist to the City of Calgary’s CTrain Light Rail Transit System security. The downtown City Hall Information Technology Data Center houses centralized failover archiving of video and redundant directories, and the core network layer itself is redundant and configured in a multiple-ring architecture.

When the CTrain system was first built, security video was installed comprising a matrix of analog cameras transmitting analog video to tapes, and eventually DVRs, which processed and archived the footage.

An IP solution was deemed most suitable. Once the project was approved, the CTrain’s Omnicast system from Genetec was designed, the stations were retrofitted and cameras were installed all inside of nine months.

“Given the solution delivered in this short timeline, this has to be the most successful security project of all time,” remarks David Sime of integrator Contava. Adds Colin Adderley, project manager and engineer at the City of Calgary, “The flexibility in architectural design of the system has allowed us to minimize single points of failure along all portions of the system.”