The constant threat of terrorist attacks and the increasingly sophisticated activities of organized criminal gangs have heightened the focus on electronic security. The result is increasing requirements for these high security and mission critical systems to be continuously available with no downtime.
Even short periods of “blindness”, when electronic security platforms are offline, often lead to long-term consequential losses. These can be far greater than the immediate financial loss, when access control, intruder alarm, perimeter protection, PSIM, video management, building management, and fire systems suffer downtime.
As someone responsible for electronic security and related systems, you understand the pressure that comes with ensuring 24x7x365 operation. Platforms which provide continuous availability are becoming an absolute requirement. With tight budgets, it is essential to ensure that implementing continuous availability requires no application modifications and integrates seamlessly with mainstream, off-the-shelf hardware and software systems. It is also critical that your continuous availability solution increases the flexibility of your options for future enhancements, and provides you with automatic monitoring and diagnosis of your electronic security system, so you can get ahead of potential problems before they occur. And let’s not forget instant access to experts to address your concerns.
Stratus has a strong track-record of delivering continuous availability solutions that are cost-competitive, simple to install and use off-the-shelf hardware to run all your applications without any modifications.
As a systems integrator, installer, or an application provider, you want to make sure your customers have a robust solution that will keep operating under all circumstances. Projects range from relatively straightforward to highly complex and multi-dimensional. Where your security systems are deemed absolutely critical, ensuring they never fail can add extra dimensions of complexity and cost with resulting increases in support requirements. This can impact both the ability to win business in competitive environments and reduce overall profitability due to unforeseen maintenance complexities.
Stratus has a continuous availability solution that is cost-competitive, simple to install and uses off-the-shelf hardware to run all your applications without any modifications. This can make the difference between winning a project or delivering an implementation on time and on budget.
As a consultant, you play a critical role advising your clients on how best to implement electronic security systems and in many cases you will produce documentation to enable projects to be put out to bid. When your clients’ requirements call for 24x7x365 operation, the right specifications to ensure continuous availability becomes a small, but critical, part of the solution.
We have created this section of our website specifically to assist consultants in understanding what continuous availability means, as well as the key requirements and best practices for an effective solution.
Like any business critical application, electronic security has some specific needs and generally requires a strong underlying technology infrastructure to be maximally effective. This foundation requires the following capabilities:
Standards based virtualization – It is expected that multiple vendors and technologies will be required to deliver a modern electronic security system. This means that the underlying infrastructure needs to be virtualization-ready with a wide range of support for different applications.
Continuous availability – Since these technologies are critical and will be consolidated to a shared set of server resources, unplanned downtime is not an option. There are many ways to mitigate the risk of unplanned downtime but a highly available or fault-tolerant solution should be easy to deploy without any specialized development or skill and easy to service in the event of a failure.
A holistic solution-oriented view – One of the most difficult challenges in operating an electronic security system is understanding and resolving operational issues. While virtualization greatly reduces the complexity of systems, the number of devices and possibly virtual servers will increase. This means that an end-to-end view of the entire security system (devices, applications and hardware) will decrease the challenges of identifying and even preventing issues before they occur.
Straus is the proven choice for leading companies such as Tyco Integrated Security, Johnson Controls and Rapiscan Systems. Our cost effective solutions deliver continuous availability without the complexity of other solutions, with the ability to monitor and manage the various devices – cameras, access control devices, etc – and deliver a fully connected electronic security environment.
We offer a range of flexible high availability solutions — software, platform and services – that are easy to deploy and manage and backed by a support structure with a 30-year track record of success. It’s no wonder that a wide range of facilities — from nuclear power plants, dams and military bases to airports, sporting arenas, industrial facilities, educational institutions, and tourist attractions — put their trust in Stratus. Our solutions can be rapidly deployed in your chosen environment — physical, virtualized or cloud — without any changes to your applications.
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