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Sawing through Linux

QNAP Security solves a French sawmill’s security concern.

Bois du Dauphiné is a famous French sawmill located in well-known Alpine industrial city, Cheylas. Covering more than 50 000 square metres, Bois du Dauphiné has averaged an annual output of more than 150 000 square metres of softwood logs to France and neighbouring European countries since 1983.

Due to the flammable nature of wood, Bois du Dauphiné fell victim to numerous fire incidents in October 2009. The sheer magnitude of the losses they suffered led management to think of the importance of emergency management. At the end of 2010, Bois du Dauphiné set out to increase security measures and raise the quality of its surveillance equipments such as network cameras and video recorders.

After careful research, it chose QNAP’s Linux-based NVR products because of its ability to support high video resolution and remote monitoring. The company expected to leverage the new system’s advantages to increase the security of their logging logistics from sawing, production, to delivery. Because the end users are non-technical personnel, Bois du Dauphiné emphasised the need for a surveillance solution that is easy to install, use and maintain.

“After analysing our client’s needs and comparing different solutions among CCTV, PC- based NVR, and standalone NVR, we recommended QNAP’s standalone 5-drive VS-5020 VioStor NVR to Bois du Dauphiné,” said Nicolas Potier, project manager at Conectis, a security consulting agency. “The VioStor NVR is user-friendly in both installation and operations. Furthermore, with only a single machine, the users can monitor and record up to 20 channels.”

Bois du Dauphiné put in place 20 Vivotek IP cameras to cover the sawmill. Coupled with QNAP VS-5020s support for megapixel resolution, these cameras clearly display their respective views in great detail. More impressively, the users can remotely view, record and playback the videos from six different sites. Moreover, Bois du Dauphiné can set up control centres in different work sites and can monitor and playback videos from the mill remotely. The VS-5020 also allows remote monitoring and video playback of the IP cameras via QNAP’s VMobile network surveillance application. By simply installing the app on any iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Android phone or Windows PDA, they can view the live video of the production line anytime, anywhere.

In the first stage of the project Bois du Dauphiné installed 20 IP cameras. It plans to increase the number of IP cameras in the mill in future. “Our customer can manage multiple NVR servers with only one interface from any remote location via QNAP’s multiserver monitoring function, which means that our customers can manage multiple QNAP NVR models as well as different brands of network cameras without installing extra software at no additional cost,” said Andrew Yu, the product manager at QNAP.

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