Miller Integrated Systems/SiteSecure Teams Up With Tampa Police Department

The Miller Integrated Systems/SiteSecure team has been qualified to provide services  to the City of Tampa Police Department's downtown CCTV surveillance system on an as-needed basis.  This qualification solicitation was intended to qualify one or more systems integrators to fix, repair, replace, troubleshoot and install the Police Department's complex wireless network, IP fixed & pan-tilt-zoom cameras, video management system and video analytics applications.

The contract term is for multiple years and will allow MIS/SiteSecure to provide services under a negotiated rate and markup for repair. With more than 50 fixed and PTZ cameras throughout the downtown area, most of them HDTV 1080p resolution, the system has become an integral part of the TPD's law enforcement effort for events such as the annual Outback Bowl, Gasparilla Pirate Fest, Children's Parade and Gasparilla Distance Classic.

SiteSecure Welcomed to the Verizon Partner Program

Watch the video below for more details.

Miller Electric Company Announces the Strategic Acquisition of SiteSecure

This merger of talent and experience allows Miller Electric Company's Integrated Systems Division to expand our product and service offerings to our new and existing client base. The SiteSecure team brings an outstanding reputation and 12 years of expertise in the IP-based video surveillance, access control, ALPR and security management system space. With their significant client based in the Florida and Houston, TX markets and Miller's expanded geographic footprint and human resources, we believe the combined team will allow us to deliver the full complement of enterprise class security management systems to go along with our other electrical and systems offerings. Their expertise in network-based applications and communication environments will also expand the resources available to the Miller Critical Infrastructure Solutions group (www.millercis.com)” said David Stallings, RCDD, Vice President of Integrated Systems for Miller Electric Company. 

SiteSecure will continue to operate “business as usual” with the SiteSecure leadership team now reporting to David Stallings. The customer-centric management philosophy is common to both companies so the blending of cultures is expected to be seamless. Since SiteSecure still exists as a Florida Limited Liability Corporation, existing contracts will remain in effect and all projects will progress without interruption.

“This acquisition represents a complete Win-Win for both companies. SiteSecure is now part of a company that understands what we do and values our team's talent and expertise. Together we can expand into markets not previously accessible to SiteSecure and with intellectual property not previously available to MECO. The synergies that exist between these companies makes this transaction a no-brainer” said Jim Fairbanks, President of SiteSecure.

SiteSecure is listed on the National IPA

SiteSecure can provide your Panasonic security solution utilizing the National IPA cooperative purchasing organization.  Using the competitively solicited Master Agreement, SiteSecure can simplify the procurement process and deliver your project quickly.

Contract Highlights:

• Contract Term: August 1‚ 2012 – July 31‚ 2017
• Panasonic Products Available:
  • IP Video Surveillance
  • CCTV Mounts & Accessories
  • Pro Displays & Video Walls
  • Toughbook® laptops
  • Toughpad™ and Toughpad™ Accessories
  • Toughbook Arbitrator 360™
• 3rd Party Complimentary Products Available:
  • Centrys Universal Power Units
  • Cambium Wireless Networking
  • Cradlepoint Cellular Networking
  • AutoVu Automated License Plate Recognition
  • Genetec Security Center Software
  • FLIR Thermal Cameras
  • Antaira Ethernet Networking
  • Seneca Data Servers & Workstations

American Dynamics, Software House and Exacq

SiteSecure is an integrator of world-leading CCTV, access control, VMS, and security software solutions.Our security integration platforms allow our customers to see more, do more, and save more.

With the most trusted brands in security in one portfolio, we offer the most comprehensive range of top level security solutions in the industry; an unbeatable combination from a single source.

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Who We Are and What We Do

When Fortune 500 corporations, government customers, or any other enterprise applications concerned with critical security issues need a reliable solution in their day to day operations, more often than not, they turn to Software House and its security and event management technologies currently installed in thousands of facilities worldwide.

Total Solution

Software House has built a solid reputation in the security industry as an innovator of security and event management technologies. With its continuous investment

in R&D, and the ability to leverage new technologies, Software House has reached technological excellence. Reliability, flexibility, and power are why many companies choose Software House solutions for their security needs. By holding true to those three qualities, Software House technologies have become the solution of choice for thousands of security-conscious businesses around the world. These solutions are put to the test every day at nearly 10,000 sites worldwide. They are designed to be a part of your business infrastructure and have been engineered to grow as your business grows. There’s no other security solution on the market that gives you the extraordinary level of control that Software House solutions provide. Software House solutions put you firmly in control of streamlined business operations.

Software House solutions include the innovative C•CURE 9000 security and event management system and the
C•CURE 800/8000 access control solution, and a wide-range of complementary hardware products.

From Entry Level to Enterprise Level

Through its access control software and hardware lines, Software House provides customers with complete, real-time control over their security systems whether large or small. Front and center in the access control portfolio, the scalable C•CURE 9000 security management platform allows users to meet security needs from entry to enterprise level. Installations range from simple door controls to enterprise integrations with thousands of doors spanning many geographical areas around the world. Software House continues to offer complete solutions, providing products that increase efficiency and fit any budget while maintaining the same high standards for performance and quality.

Seamless Integration

With an open architecture and unsurpassed integration platform, Software House C•CURE solutions allows customers to integrate seamlessly with critical security and business applications giving users full control through a single user interface. Whether your business calls for highly elaborate integration between multiple systems, or a simple connection between an alarm and a camera, Software House delivers the right systems and the right level of integration. C•CURE can be integrated a variety of third-party products from video and intercom to intrusion and fire detection. Software House continues its commitment to expanding these products and services to meet the diverse and growing needs of its customers.

A name you can trust. People and products you can count on.

American Dynamics develops some of the world's most needed video technologies. Technologies that help retailers thwart organized crime to protect their bottom line, and universities provide peace of mind to parents of incoming students. Technologies that help our governments secure ports and borders, and hospitals ensure the safety and privacy of their patients. Technologies that move beyond security to become essential business-enabling tools.

From its beginning in the early 1970s as a DVR and matrix switcher company, to its proud stance today as a leading provider of IP solutions, American Dynamics has always stood for reliability, customer commitment, and integrity. While technology and products change at breakneck speeds, those values are steadfast and they are part of the American Dynamics vision.

A vision reflected in the applications engineer who finds a solution to a complex installation by staying on a 4 hour phone call with a customer.

And, in the product manager who tirelessly studies industry trends to ensure he brings exactly the right products to market, at the right time.

And, in the engineer who miraculously finds a way to make the impossible happen.

American Dynamics may mean cameras and recorders and sophisticated video management. But it's the dedication and insight of over 2,000 employees in 9 countries that enable our Dynamic Vision.

From Dynamic Vision to Problem Solving Technologies

Vision. That's what led to the most popular digital video recorder in the industry, Intellex. Hundreds of thousands of customers around the world rely on Intellex video every day to ensure their businesses run smoothly.

And as the shift to IP begins to change the security landscape, thousands of customers are leveraging the unique solution offered by victor unified video management systems which allows them to use both Intellex DVRs with analog SpeedDome cameras, and VideoEdge NVRs with Illustra IP cameras.

Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, is a leading developer of open architecture, Video Management System (VMS) solutions for security and surveillance applications. Our exacqVision VMS client-server solutions are scalable from a small single camera solution to large scale corporate or campus systems with thousands of cameras. Real-time and recorded video can be viewed, managed and configured from any location on the network.

exacqVision's open architecture VMS software ensures interoperability with IP cameras, servers and storage systems from manufacturers such as IBM, HP and Dell. Open architecture software allows customers the ability to select the highest quality components from a wide variety of manufacturers. We support all of the leading IP video cameras from Axis Communications, Arecont Vision, IQinvision, GE, Panasonic, Sony, ACTi, CBC Ganz, Vivotek, and more. Open architecture VMS software also provides flexibility of choosing the storage system that best fits the requirements by using the operating systems file system to map the system drives for video storage. Customers may select internal disk storage, RAID, iSCSI, DAS or SAN.

exacqVision's advanced virtual matrix switching and display enables the deployment of sophisticated surveillance solutions for remote and centralized monitoring. Virtual matrix switching will automatically route video to monitors upon internal or external events. Fast PTZ control and automated camera touring route video to a designated display based on external events or manual control. External events include triggers from contact closure sensors, video motion, serial & IP streams from access control, building automation, ATM and POS systems.

Exacq provides both exacqVisionVMS software and preconfigured hybrid and IPS systems giving our customers the choice and convenience of deploying solutions to meet the needs and requirements as specified. Preconfigured systems simplify and speed the selection and installation process. Software-only VMS solutions provide customers with the choice of selecting their hardware manufacturer and the price and performance desired.

Embracing Flash Storage

During the past 25 years the performance gap between CPU and hard disk based storage systems has increased  exponentially every year. To meet the needs of today’s performance hungry applications, IT professionals have utilized a variety of clever approaches to bridge this gap. These approaches range from using limited amounts of expensive cache memory to various RAID schemes and intelligent firmware. However, in spite of these improvements, the traditional hard disk drive (HDD) storage systems have struggled to keep up with the I/O performance requirements of modern applications.

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Flash Storage Economic Ecosystem

Flash storage can deliver impressive performance, especially for random I/O, by eliminating rotational and seek latencies that are common in all HDD storage systems. This is particularly relevant in today’s virtualized application world where I/O access patterns are much more random due to the “blender effect” of virtualization.

Furthermore, flash storage is available now at a much more affordable price point than cache memory. As aresult flash storage can be deployed in larger capacity than cache, more like HDD storage. With the increasing adoption of flash storage in the data center, some industry pundits are projecting that the economies of scale will eventually drive down the cost of flash storage to the same level as HDD storage and flash storage will, over time, replace HDD storage altogether.

Not all flash storage drives are created equal

Although flash storage can be readily substituted for HDD storage in a data center, it is fundamentally a different medium– silicon or electronic NAND gates vs. magnetic media – with very different performance, cost and data retention characteristics that may impact the economics and operations of your application workloads in your datacenter. Hence, it is important to understand some basics of flash storage technology before considering its adoption.

• Write Endurance: Unlike magnetic media on HDD storage, data stored on flash needs to be erased before something new can be written or “programmed” – this is known as the Program-Erase Cycle (PE/C). The maximum number of PE/Cs of NAND gates on flash storage is in the order of a few thousand, after which, the performance and reliability of the flash storage drive drops dramatically - up to 10 times performance degradation may occur. This characteristic of flash technology limits the number of write operations that can be performed on a flash drive. This limitation of flash drive is called the Write Endurance and is expressed in full drive writes per day (or drive fills per day).

• Write Cliff: The requirement to erase a block of NAND gates in a flash drive before they can be written means that a flash drive needs to keep pre-erased blocks in order to improve performance – even for a small block write – by eliminating the latency that would be incurred if the erase process was performed every time on an as-needed basis. If a flash drive runs out of pre-erased blocks, especially when the drive fills up or during a sustained write intensive operation, it is possible to experience a large (50+ms) delay while the flash drive tries to create a free block of NAND gates. This write performance degradation in a flash drive is called a Write Cliff.

There are many ways to deal with write endurance and write cliff in a flash drive, impacting its cost and life span. For example, the write cliff is typically avoided / delayed by over-provisioning capacity for internal housekeeping (increasing cost/GB) and a process known as “wear leveling” which spreads out re-writes to the same block to new locations on the flash storage thus ensuring that the drive wears out evenly (increasing drive lifespan).

Today, there are three common types of enterprise flash drives in the market based on write endurance. Your flash drive selection for each of your application workloads may impact your data center economics and operations.

• Read Optimized (RO) or Multi-Layer Cell (MLC) Drive: This type of drive is optimized for read operations. Typically, MLC flash drives have a Write Endurance of 1-to-3 drive fills per day. They are also the least expensive of the enterprise-class flash drives.

• Write Intensive (WI) or Single Layer Cell (SLC) Drive: This type of drive has a higher Write Endurance and   are typically more over-provisioned than the RO drives. Write Endurance of SLC flash drives is typically 20-to-30 drive fills per day. The increased write endurance comes at a cost; making this the most expensive and most reliable enterprise flash drive.

• Mixed Use (MU) or Enterprise MLC (eMLC) Drive: These type of drives attempt to strike a balance between SLC and MLC drives both from a Write Endurance and cost perspective. Typical Write Endurance for MU drives is somewhere between 5-to-10 drive fills per day.

Deploying Flash in an Enterprise IT Solution

As shown in Figure 1 flash storage can be used in different layers of an IT solution to improve application I/O performance. Of course, like any technology, there is no one approach that suits all use cases and you must use the right flash storage for the right application to realize the economic and operational benefits of flash storage for your datacenter.

Flash as Multiple Tiers in a Storage Array

There has been a significant reduction in the price of flash storage over the past several years- on a $ per GB basis flash storage is nearing 15K RPM HDD prices. Hence it is now possible to deploy multiple flash drive types as multiple tiers of storage within an array. This strategy allows customers to deploy larger capacities of flash storage. When coupled with intelligent tiering capabilities this strategy extends the benefits of the flash storage to a larger percentage of the deployed capacity. Although this approach extends the benefits of flash storage to a larger portion of deployed capacity by blending HDDs and different types of flash drives, its effectiveness is entirely dependent on the maturity and flexibility of the tiering capabilities of the array software.

Flash as Cache in Storage Array

Figure 1: Flash Storage can be deployed at various layers in an of storage within an array. This strategy allows enterprise IT solution.

One of the earliest adoptions of flash has been as a second layer cache within the storage array. The goal is to insert a faster medium in between the DRAM based system cache and slower hard drives. The array software is enhanced with the intelligence to use the flash drives as a second level of cache. By moving hot data into the flash storage cache, the need to read data from HDD is reduced leading to a reduction in latency, thereby delivering a performance boost to applications.

Although this approach can deliver performance acceleration by expanding the storage controller cache layer by combining it with flash storage, it requires a warm-up period to fill the cache with workload hotspots and often comes with the associated drawbacks, such as higher response times on Monday mornings after backup jobs are executed over the weekend.