Providing Access Control at Gerald R. Ford International Airport

December 14, 2015

When Gerald R. Ford International Airport needed a security system to provide access control at the airport, they decided to implement a Johnson Controls P2000-based solution. This system provides an effective foundation for mission-critical security needs. Operators can perform functions easily—the system is based on the Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 operating system. An underlying Microsoft ® SQL Server™ 2000 database offers high performance without high over head. The system operator has real-time access to an interactive facility map, featuring dynamic icons, to monitor and control access points.

The Need for Continuous Operation

Because of the critical nature of this system, the Gerald R. Ford International Airport had to ensure that the Windows-based P2000 system would be guaranteed to run with extremely high availability. Downtime of this solution could not be tolerated because the system must comply with Transportation Security Regulation Part 1542. This regulation requires that the doors are monitored 100% of the time. As a result, the specification required continuous operation 24x7x365. After a fair amount of effort with clustering solutions, these options were found to be cumbersome and not sufficient to pass the required tests.

The Stratus Choice
Johnson Controls and Gerald R. Ford International Airport turned to Stratus Technologies for its everRun FT solution, which allows the airport to configure two Windows servers under the control of the Stratus everRun FT software. The system was set up in a very short time and passed the required tests immediately.

Stratus everRun FT software synchronizes two standard Windows servers to create a virtual application environment that runs a single license of P2000 on both servers simultaneously. If a device or even an entire server fails, P2000 continues to operate uninterrupted. All redundancies and failures are completely transparent to the applications and users.

Applications are installed, run, managed and accessed through the single virtual server, eliminating the need to license, install and manage multiple copies as required in clustering and failover situations.

The results

“The everRun solution for P2000, offers us the extremely high level of availability we need for our critical access control system at the airport”, says Rob Benstein, Public Safety and Operations Director of Gerald R. Ford International Airport.

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