Origin 3200 Server for Spain's Ministry of Justice Asset Management SystemAmsterdam 14 September 2001 The SGI Origin 3200 server was chosen as a key component of a recently installed video/audio capture, asset management and archiving system at the Ministry of Justice in Madrid, Spain. To comply with a new law requiring all civil court sessions to be recorded and made available to court staff and involved parties, Vitelsa of Madrid and ADM (Andalucia Digital Multimedia) tendered the offer. The special engineering division of ADM, which has now become a separate company named Tedial, was the project integrator.
A complete system of 25 digital video cameras in Madrid's 25 civil courtrooms was installed, which provide video and audio data that is cataloged using ADM/Tedial's TARSYS asset management software integrated with the modular SGI Origin 3200 high-performance server. "We selected the SGI Origin 3200 server because of its high-bandwidth I/O and its ease of integration with many different types of equipment and platforms", stated Emilio Lopez Zapata, chief engineer of Tedial. Mr. Zapata is also the lead developer of TARSYS and a professor at Malaga University, where he has worked with SGI equipment since the early 1990s.
"For this specific system, we integrated our asset management software with SGI servers and disk arrays and StorageTek tape libraries. We also had to integrate the Optibase video card and
Oracle databases. All the video/audio feeds and the various products had to be integrated", added Mr. Zapata.
The asset management system, accessible only via the Ministry of Justice's intranet, is capable of processing hundreds of hours of video and audio daily. Some important requirements of the Ministry project were that the system be readily available for future viewings and appeal purposes and that it be easy to use, easy to edit material on, and highly reliable. The Ministry wanted lawyers and litigants to be able to select any of the catalogued files by a number of methods such as using the case number, names of persons involved in the session, reference number, the name of the judge or the date of the session. One of the many new functions of TARSYS software, running on
the IRIX OS-based SGI Origin 3200 server, is automatic storyboarding-allowing the user to easily select key frames and then cut, copy, paste or edit any specific part of the court proceedings desired.
Noting that Tedial has just completed installing similar systems using SGI Origin family servers at City TV, a new local TV station in Barcelona, and at the AudioVisual Council in Cataluña, Mr. Zapata added: "Another reason we chose SGI Origin family technology is that its modular scalability enables our customers' systems to grow, both in terms of the number of simultaneous software users and the number of capture systems." System expansion is a very real possibility at the Ministry of Justice, since the Spanish Parliament is currently considering requiring the same video/audio recording and archiving accessibility for criminal cases.
Ad Emmen [News on Advanced IT] [Calendar] [Analysis] [IT in Medicine] |
 |