Western Australia’s Public Transport Authority enhances public safety

As a leading public transport agency in Australia, PTA has deployed an integrated, state-of-the-art video surveillance and storage archive system with more than 3 PBs of DDN SFA® high-performance storage, which can scale economically to 20 PBs of data to meet the unique performance and capacity requirements needed in these environments.

As the PTA increased its surveillance footage across thousands of cameras operating at higher resolutions, such as HD, the organization began to experience enormous strain on its underlying storage systems used to support video surveillance efforts.

PTA solved the challenge by implementing centralized video surveillance and high-capacity DDN storage, which enables the organization to ingest footage from 1,800 live and recorded cameras. With real-time data from these cameras captured at a minimum of 24 frames per second and then archived for 31 days, PTA has moved beyond traditional post-event investigations and become more proactive in detecting and deterring potential criminal activity.

Consequently, the PTA’s ability to produce finely detailed video evidence of criminal behavior across 72 stations, 234 railcars, 32 facilities and several ferry services has supported a 97 percent rate of successful prosecutions. The robust CCTV and storage solution also is a cornerstone of PTA’s counter-terrorism approach because it enables the agency to monitor real-time activity and initiate rapid response to suspicious items or activities.

Additionally, PTA is taking advantage of its combined video surveillance and storage platform to combat the growing epidemic of graffiti vandalism, which costs Western Australia taxpayers $2.8 million each year. Together, the solution plays a big part in helping PTA identify, arrest and prosecute graffiti vandals, reducing graffiti clean-up hours by more than 70 percent each year.

With exceptional CCTV coverage, resolution and retention of images, PTA will be able to incorporate new safety and security applications, such as facial recognition and behavioral pattern and anomaly detection as those technologies develop. Since adding DDN storage, PTA has seen a reduction in frivolous complaints against transit officers by 70 percent in the past five years in part as a result of the agency’s ability to more quickly assess and review incident footage.

With DDN technology, PTA has improved performance with an average of 6 GB/s of throughput, which is more than eight times the demand needed to support its cameras.

To provide the highest levels of flexibility and resiliency while conserving much-needed space in its data center, PTA virtualized its servers and storage using VMware, providing much-needed, increased capacity to store multiple petabytes of footage in a small data center footprint.

DDN’s DirectProtect™ real-time error detection and correction bolsters storage resiliency by reducing the number and performance impact of drive rebuilds.

PTA’s participation in a statewide police command center enabled additional surveillance footage to be captured in security-sensitive areas and then stored and archived while minimizing disruption or deletion.