NICE News Special Edition - Volume 2, Issue 5

	UPDATE FROM JIM PARK NICE PERFORM^TM SELECTED FOR FAA REGISTER FOR INSIGHT 2006 @ APCO REAPING THE BENEFITS OF REDUNDANT RECORDING TELECOMMUNICATOR OF THE YEAR: SHERRY WOOD CAMERON COUNTY NICE IP VIDEO SURVEILLANCE AWARD NICE CORPORATE NEWS NICE EVENTS




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REAPING THE BENEFITS OF REDUNDANT RECORDING

What's the cost of a lost recording - that 9-1-1 call or radio transmission that either didn't get recorded in the first place, or was lost after the fact? If it's the one you need, it could cost more than you think - a life, a conviction, a lawsuit. Consider these scenarios:

...A man calls 9-1-1 and says he has just killed his wife.

...A frantic woman places an emergency call and reports an intruder in her home. As she speaks in a hushed voice, the call is disconnected.

...A police officer is shot while responding to a domestic violence incident.

...A PSAP takes a call from a citizen who later succumbs from a severe asthma attack.

While different, these scenarios have one thing in common. Each incident, captured and preserved through voice recording, can retell the story of what happened. Without voice recordings, an organization's protection from liability is compromised. The right life-saving split-second decisions might not be made. A murderer could walk free. The safety of your first responders and citizens may be at risk.

Now ask yourself - how confident are you that your emergency communications are always captured - and that they'll be there when you need them, even if disaster strikes? If you answered "no" in either case, read on. You'll learn how three leading public safety entities - Harris County (TX), the Fire Department of New York (FDNY), and the Monroe County (NY) Emergency Communications Department (ECD) - are reaping the benefits of redundant recording to capture and preserve their mission-critical emergency communications.

The Harris County Regional Radio Center
The Houston, TX-based Harris County Regional Radio Center operates a massive, multi-site 800 Megahertz trunked radio network used by 497 different organizations, including local law enforcement and government agencies. "Our radio system is one of the largest in the United States, with over 25,000 units and 1,200 talkgroups," said Steve Jennings, chief information officer for Harris County. "We have nine counties on the system including EMS and fire departments and law enforcement agencies, as well as the United States Army, the DEA, and the Coast Guard."

"With such a large number and wide range of agencies on our system, it really mandates that we have a redundant recording system," explained Jennings. "The reality is that recording is tremendously important to ensure the safety of our responders, to ensure the process that responders perform to, and to enhance performance by being able to go back and review what happened. Also, if you have a calamity or a really complex interaction with multiple agencies, the recording shows what transpired at the time - ultimately, it protects the organization and the public safety responder."

Capitalizing on its experience with other major metropolitan areas and large radio systems, NICE designed a solution to capture an estimated quarter of a million radio interactions per day from the Harris County Motorola SmartZone^® radio network, ensuring those calls would always be available to the agencies for review and analysis.

Redundancy was a key need for the County, not just from the standpoint of recording the radio calls, but also from the standpoint of capturing the trunked radio data. "The data is very important because in a trunked system without the data you really can't put a call back together," explained Craig Bernard, managing director of the Harris County Regional Radio Center. "And even if you've captured all the calls, you may not be able to locate the one you want without the trunked data."

The County's trunked radio recording solution was designed to capture trunked radio data (such as radio IDs and talkgroup IDs) from two sources. First, it taps into the control channel (the frequency in the trunking system used to convey such information). It also interfaces directly with the radio network to capture and decode the ATIA (Air Traffic Information Access) data stream. Bernard wanted to log the data from two independent sources in the radio system for added redundancy. "It's very rare that we would lose both," he said. "But in case we lose one we'll still have the other."

Harris County's radio network consists of 22 tower sites spread over a 12,500 square mile area. To capture all of the radio communications on this mammoth network, NICE is installing recorders at 10 of the 22 tower sites which are located in Houston, Alvin, Brazoria, Walker West, Ames, Tamina, Clodine, Hempstead, Chambers and Fort Bend, Texas. "Since we are recording over-the-air, we are trying to consolidate as many sites as possible into one site," said Bernard. "We determined that we could receive audio from other locations at certain tower sites. That's how we were able to take 22 tower sites and record them in 10 locations."

All of the radio transmissions captured at each of the 10 sites are stored on a local recording system equipped with redundant power supplies and RAID 1 mirrored hard drives. The mirrored hard drives capture and store two copies of voice recordings and the associated call detail data. If one disk fails, the mirrored disk will continue to capture calls and radio communications with no loss of data.

Harris County's recordings are also centrally archived at a backup site. "It was critical to us to duplicate not only how we record everything, but also how we store it," said Jennings. Audio and trunked radio data that's captured at the tower sites is pumped back to Harris County's main control center in Houston, Texas over T1 lines. Using the NICE Storage Center, the audio is stored on a 10 terabyte server. "It's really for disaster recovery and backup," added Jennings. "Odds are we won't lose both places. It gets back to the critical reason of why we record everything. It's about responder safety and agency liability. If we didn't have to worry about these two things, we wouldn't record anything."

The Fire Department of New York
The largest Municipal Fire Department in the United States, the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) is the first responder for fires and medical emergencies within New York City. The FDNY responds to more than 1.7 million calls a year. Most of the emergency calls arrive at the six FDNY dispatch locations as transferred 9-1-1 calls from the New York City Police Department PSAC (Public Safety Answering Center). Still others come in as direct calls or from "pull boxes" dispersed throughout the City.

Emanating from the five fire COs (one for each of the City's five boroughs - the Bronx, Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens) - is a network of firehouses that respond to the fire emergencies. Call-takers at the COs alert firehouse staff of fires via an intercom system. Once en route, they communicate by radio. A sixth site located in Brooklyn (Emergency Medical Dispatch) handles the emergency medical calls for New York City.

All of the FDNY's critical emergency calls, intercom communications and radio transmissions (between the dispatch and mobile units and first responders in the field) are captured on a fully redundant 720-channel NICE recording system. The FDNY purchased the system from iXP Corporation, a leading consulting company specializing in solutions and integration services for the public safety market.

Resiliency was a critical FDNY requirement so iXP and NICE designed redundancy into the solution at every level to safeguard emergency communications.

The first level of redundancy was to install parallel recording systems equipped with RAID 5 and dual power supplies at each the five fire COs and at the Brooklyn EMD site. This configuration ensures that each call and radio transmission is captured twice and offers maximum protection from data loss.

Geographic redundancy is built into the FDNY system as well. The voice communications from each of the six sites are transmitted via WAN to the backup site (PSAC 1) on a continuous, near real-time basis, where they are captured on primary and secondary RAID arrays that provide one year and three months of online storage, respectively. This architecture offers the FDNY high speed online storage coupled with centralized access to recordings. Most importantly, it provides disaster protection. If recordings at any of the remote sites are ever lost, for any reason, there are backup copies.

Using the NICE Storage Center, recordings are also copied from the dual backup RAID servers at PSAC 1 to dual LTO storage arrays for long term storage. Copies of each recording are retained on the LTO tapes (one is kept at PSAC 1, another is stored off site) for 28 years.

Call details - the data associated with each voice recording that makes it possible to search and replay captured interactions with pinpoint precision - are also redundantly captured and meticulously preserved on call database servers located at each site. That data is routinely fed over the WAN to backup call database servers at PSAC 1.

The real beauty of the FDNY solution is that the system - in spite of its many built in layers of redundancy and geographic dispersion - acts as a single unified solution, making it seamless to the user. An FDNY user can retrieve a captured interaction without having to know, or specify, where it is stored. When a user requests a recording, the system automatically knows where to retrieve the recording - whether from the local recorder's RAID storage, the backup RAID at PSAC 1, or the LTO jukebox.

The system also gives the FDNY secure access to recordings over the network, but if the network unexpectedly goes down, there's a provision for that too. Each of the parallel recording systems at the five fire COs and Brooklyn EMD is equipped with an AIT deck, so recordings can be quickly copied to AIT and delivered to the requesting party.

The Monroe County Emergency Communications Department (ECD)
The Monroe County (NY) ECD employs a fully redundant NICE Systems' recording solution which it purchased from independent distributor and NICE partner, Wilmac. The Monroe County ECD is the central answering point for all of Monroe County, including the City of Rochester. The Center, operated by the City under contract with Monroe County, takes over 1.2 million calls per year, dispatching services for over 76 different agencies. All of these communications are captured on two primary recorders. A third recorder is employed in an "N+1" configuration should either of the two primary recorders unexpectedly fail. Each recorder includes redundant power supplies and stores all of the captured interactions in three places: on a hard drive and on dual DVDs for added backup.

The County also maintains a separate 48 channel recorder at an emergency backup site on the other side of the City. Both sites and systems are seamlessly connected over the County's fiber network.

The County's director, John Merklinger, can cite examples of cases where 9-1-1 recordings have resulted in convictions, and he says this level of redundancy is essential given the importance of the recordings. "We've had many cases in the last few years where our 9-1-1 recordings have actually resulted in convictions," he attested. "We've even had instances where individuals have confessed to crimes over the phone." What could happen if a recording was missed? Merklinger ponders the worst case scenario: "Imagine that somebody called 9-1-1 to report a crime, confessed to it, and we didn't have that recording for court," he said.