English Premier League 2016 Champions Trust Pivot3 with Their Most Critical Video Data
About the Customer
In May 2016, Leicester City F.C. rose to international fame by winning its first English
Premier League (EPL) title. To claim the trophy, the 132-year-old club had to beat 5,000-
to-1 bookmaker’s odds and overcome storied rivals such as Arsenal, Tottenham and
Manchester United. Sports critics called it “one of the greatest triumphs in the history of
English Football.” Leicester City, also known as the Foxes, plays its home matches at King
Power Stadium. Opened in 2002, the 32,626-seat venue is one of the 20 largest in the U.K.
The Challenge
The Premier League is not only at the top of the English football league system, but also
the most-watched football league in the world: average match attendance exceeds 36,000,
and worldwide broadcasts create a potential TV audience of nearly 5 billion people.
Security and video surveillance is a top concern at every EPL stadium. After fatal incidents
in the 1970s and 1980s involving fire, out-of-control crowds, and hooligan violence, British
authorities conducted extensive research and then issued guidelines on spectator safety
that are now followed by all EPL clubs.
Since then, continuous video surveillance has become even more important for
monitoring game-day crowds and heading off any problems that might endanger specta
-tors—and, when needed, providing situational awareness and collecting evidence to help
law enforcement efforts.
Following a required security update in 2013, Leicester City’s small IT department faced
the task of finding a video surveillance solution that could ensure continuous, high-quali
-ty recording across scores of cameras, protect terabytes of data per month and leave that
data easily accessible by club and law enforcement personnel, including non-specialists.
“We essentially have a two-person IT department,” said Lee Richmond, manager of IT
for the club, “so we needed a solution that is highly resilient, but also easy to manage for
non-technical users such as the security personnel who manage the cameras.”
The solution also had to be scalable enough to accommodate Leicester City’s expansion
plans for King Power Stadium, yet also agile and flexible enough to work optimally with
legacy security system components to create a system future-proofed for growth.
The Solution
Dynamic hyperconvergence provider Pivot3 partnered with ADT Security Services and
Milestone Systems, providing the software-defined video surveillance infrastructure for
ADT’s successful bid to supply security solutions for King Power Stadium.
Pivot3’s Surveillance Series provides hyperconverged server and SAN storage platforms
that are purpose-built for the most demanding video workloads. The company’s
Surveillance Series meets the uncompromising video recording and storage standards
of the EPL, providing the highest levels of performance and availability so critical surveil
lance data is stored without loss, protected from any failures and always available when
and where it is needed.
In addition to supporting large-scale installations from hundreds to thousands of
cameras, Pivot3 consolidates video management, access control and other related
applications onto a single platform, eliminating the need for separate physical servers
and providing much higher levels of resiliency and fault tolerance to the entire application
suite while reducing costs, complexity and valuable rack space.
“Currently, Pivot3’s installation at King Power Stadium supports 120 cameras and the
24 TB of video data that they collect each month,” said Richmond. “Because the system
can easily scale, we can add additional nodes to meet any potential requirements if the
stadium is expanded in the future.”
The Results
The new Surveillance Series appliances have worked flawlessly within Leicester City’s
existing security environment. Built-in server failover prevents system downtime, while
advanced fault tolerance prevents loss of stored data. Besides increasing uptime, the
system’s advanced performance has actually improved image quality as well.
Pivot3’s ease of expansion not only removes scalability concerns, but also allows the club
to control costs because it can now grow its video system without having to make a large
upfront investment. “One of the things that impressed us with Pivot3 is how easy it is to
scale,” Richmond said. “If we expand the stadium—or if we decide to increase the number
of cameras or deploy new high definition technology—all we need do is to purchase and
install a new appliance.” The required storage, bandwidth and compute capacity can be
added incrementally, which allows the club to avoid overprovisioning.
Richmond added that “Ease of management was one of the deciding factors in choosing
Pivot3.” The solution’s centralized management interface reduces human error, saves time
and frees the small IT team to respond to network issues or other IT tasks. Rather than
having to manage disparate components of IT infrastructure, the team now controls the
entire system through a “single pane of glass.” Leicester City now enjoys the simplicity,
scalability and cost savings in video surveillance that will enable them to maintain their
fans’ safety and security as they look to add to their historic EPL title.
About Pivot3
Pivot3 improves the simplicity and economics of the enterprise datacenter with indus
–
try-leading hyperconverged infrastructure technology. By combining storage, compute,
and networking on commodity hardware, Pivot3 provides software-defined platforms
that let IT run multiple, mixed application workloads on a single infrastructure while guar
-anteeing performance to the applications that matter most. Pivot3’s agile infrastructure
solutions extend performance, scale and efficiency across more of the datacenter so cus
-tomers can keep pace with the demands of modern business. With over 2,400 customers
in 54 countries and 18,000 hyperconverged deployments in multiple industries such as
healthcare, government, transportation, security, entertainment, education, gaming and
retail, Pivot3 is redefining HCI with smarter infrastructure solutions.