Customer Stories

Pivot3 supports US Army in Iraq

posted on 24 May 2008 14:36

RAIGE into the Iraqi Bazaar

Roadside bomb detection saves soldiers lives in Iraq and their ability to detect and respond to such IEDs - Improvised Explosive Devices - is going to get better through 360 degree, geo-immersive route reconnaissance video data stored on Pivot3 storage arrays. Think Google street view for Bagdad.

The US Army in Iraq has a Rapid Equipment Force which has an IT facility called the Bazaar project. This is being updated with T-ISR, the Terrestrial-Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance system. A vehicle-mounted video camera and software system from Immersive Media records activity in a 360-degree Field of view around the vehicle as it moves along a route. This is video surveillance army style.

The Bazaar project manages the resulting large volumes of collected video for use in operational and intelligence planning - watching out for and detecting road-side bombs. This project capability is being provided by ACS-Security LLC in partnership with Pivot3, whose clustered storage is used to hold the video data.

ACG-Security is a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) formed in 2005. It provides multimedia geo-referenced products integrated into other vulnerability products and has developed a collection and threat analysis process that integrates all the technologies involved. Collected data is archived into a relational database with secure web browser access.

Pivot3's RAIGE (RAID Across Independent Gigabit Ethernet nodes) technology clusters storage nodes together to meet the storage needs of bandwidth and capacity-intensive environments such as video surveillance. It provides the fast scale-out capability needed in intensive video surveillance data collection environments such as this. The company is the fastest growing storage company in the video surveillance market.

Fred Kleibacker, CEO of ACG-Security, said: “Rapid deployment and field-flexibility are key requirements that the Pivot3 clustered storage brings to the project. Remembering where this is deployed, we needed a solution that was failure-resistant and would allow them to scale as their data needs grow. Because of its focus on video surveillance, the flexibility of its products, and how easily changes are implemented, Pivot3 met these requirements....”

Lee Caswell, founder and chief marketing officer of Pivot3, offered this thought: “This partnership is a text-book case study showing how open-systems companies work together to simplify large-scale video deployments. By working together, the companies tap into ACG’s deep understanding of the field requirements and take advantage of Pivot3’s flexible, scalable storage. Government customers are increasingly looking to add video as a strategic data type, and the use of open systems makes large-scale storage supportable and affordable.”

It certainly is a very large scale storage project indeed, and it takes only a moment's reflection to realize just how incredibly important it is that stored video data of a mission route is accessed and interpreted in real-time. Seconds, fractions of a second even, count and violent injuries or death can result if the storage system fails. Mission-critical really does mean mission-critical in this instance.

The deliverable result of Bazaar is superior situational awareness capability for vehicle-bound soldiers in combat, and that will save lives. Pivot3 storage is directly contributing to this goal.

^{[B&F staff.]}