Client
A multinational pharmaceutical company based in Hyderabad, India, which manufactures and sells an extensive range of pharmaceuticals.
The manufacturing unit in Hyderabad is a sprawling area of 10,000 square feet facility that is guarded using 210 cameras of different brands. The manufacturing process-line inside the plant has 60 high-definition Sony cameras.
Challenge
Pharmaceutical businesses operate in a highly regulated environment. These companies are required to demonstrate compliance in several areas including the manufacturing process. Other than documentation, companies now record high quality videos (1080 pixels at 25 frames/second) of all production processes and retain them in a reliable storage medium for future access. These recordings help demonstrate compliance without ambiguity.
Likewise, our client firm sought to record each aspect of their drug manufacturing process - from raw materials, intermediates, final products, and packing materials – and preserve the recordings for a period of 3-12 years and make them available during regulatory inspection.
The high-resolution, continuous video recording amounted to a large volume of data and posed a challenge in terms of storage. There was approximately 340 GB of video from 60 HD cameras every year. The company was initially storing all the recordings online on their servers; but growing volume of storage on expensive server space was leading to an exponential rise in costs.
There was an immediate need to reduce the video storage to a healthy size. Tape drives were a less expensive alternative to store data that was being accessed only during inspections. However, there was the challenge of transferring the recordings from online servers to offline tape drives, as the process called for an expensive software.
The company’s increasing storage needs and limited budget option put them in a dilemma - whether to keep storing video recordings on expensive servers or to archive them in less expensive tape drive, by investing in additional software.
Solution
After deep research, the firm chose Mindtree’s Gladius Video Management Software (VMS) with integrated storage management solution to solve their dual needs of video surveillance (security) and video storage management – all this without purchasing additional software.
Using a single interface solution, the company is now able to secure their premise and keep their storage costs within budget.
Catering to the client’s every need
The company analyzed the offerings of many competitive companies and found Mindtree’s Gladius as the only solution that provided them recording on online storage and archiving on offline storage.
The firm was able to maximize the retention value from limited available storage through a unique feature in Gladius solution - an option to categorize video recordings from different sets of cameras as high, medium and low priority. For each category, the user could configure different overriding policies such as number of days before override. Thus with varying priorities, storage space is used in an efficient manner; the client is now able to extract more value from their storage investments.
Portability, flexibility and ease of use
Our client is now able to archive the recordings not just on the tape drives, but also on any NAS (network attached storage), SAN (storage area network), DAS (direct attached storage) or external disk storage; this is all possible because of the flexibility provided by an open-platform solution of Gladius.
Through an intuitive single interface, the company is now able to easily archive, retrieve and play-back the recordings as and when required, without a need of an additional software.
Value-added service
Other than the video surveillance and storage management, Gladius provides people-counting analytics on two cameras installed inside a unit. This added analytics feature has helped our client keep track of the number of people inside the unit at any particular instance in time. The number is displayed on an external display outside the unit for supervisors to keep a check and take required action when needed.
