Express Stores centrally monitors 200+ locations with Surveillance Station

In 2016, as the company looked to add 81 new retail locations, they realized they had already exhausted their traditional off-the-shelf surveillance infrastructure. After the company investigated, they realized that the lack of central management software as well as an excess of incompatible hardware and troubleshooting continually taxed their limited IT department resources. Express Stores realized it was time to streamline and modernize their surveillance infrastructure.

After the realization, Express Store's Senior IT Leadership Team began searching for a solution to their aging equipment. Through rigorous research and collaboration with their technology provider, Express Stores decided Synology was their best solution.

In the last seven months Express Stores has deployed 76 Synology RackStation RS816/RS815RP+ units with a total of 934 corresponding IP cameras in 76 retail locations, with a master host Synology RackStation RS18017xs+ centrally managing the entire system. 

Express Stores has been able to monitor all 76 locations using Surveillance Station's Central Management System (CMS) allowing both the IT Leadership team and field management team easy access to live feeds and recorded footage. This also gave their IT Department the tools and resources necessary to monitor and maintain the system remotely without having to physically visit each location, saving both time and resources.

The Synology surveillance solution was also "a lifesaver" when Hurricane Irma struck, said Tompkins. Due to the solution already being implemented in 32 of its Florida stores, Express Stores was able to monitor the stores remotely thanks to the power recovery feature which allowed the Synology RackStation units to automatically resume operation when power was restored, meaning they could assess the damage from afar and react accordingly.

Each RackStation unit runs a Synology Hybrid RAID configuration with at least two hard drives, ensuring the systems remain operational in the event of unexpected drive failure. By bonding the Gigabit Ethernet links using the built-in link aggregation support, the systems can handle a larger amount of traffic and are able to better cope with the massive load of data and users connecting to the platform.

In the future, Express Stores plans to roll out Synology in all of their 200+ retail locations. Thanks to Synology's compatibility with a large selection IP cameras and drives, they have confidence in the system's flexibility knowing that down the road they can swap out cameras or hard drives as needed, all while continuing to monitor every location remotely using CMS.