Taking over the maintenance of an extra-low voltage installation in a shopping centre
Already responsible for managing the telecoms network at the Muse shopping centre in Metz, Blue Wire is now taking over the management of the extra-low voltage systems
The technical management team at the Muse shopping centre in Metz asked Blue Wire to take over the maintenance of their security system. Our teams have therefore assumed responsibility for a substantial Genetec installation, which currently handles :
Taking over an existing installation is not the same as putting in a new one. The record of past interventions is rarely complete, passwords and licences have passed through the hands of several contractors, and the documentation tends to reflect the original installation rather than its actual state. The first step is therefore to draw up an inventory: equipment in service, software versions, condition of the disks, known points of failure. This work is not spectacular, but everything that follows depends on it.
- Video surveillance (120 cameras)
- Access control
- Intruder alarm
- Intercom
- Internal network
As soon as we took over the installation, we increased the recording capacity, moving from 10 days (with the disks heavily saturated) to 20 days while retaining spare capacity. We also carried out three Genetec updates on a parallel server.
At the same time, and in order to ensure the greatest possible continuity of service, we virtualised the existing server, which allows a full backup to be taken and therefore makes it possible to replace the hardware in under two hours.
For the operator, the issue is not a technical one: it is legal and operational. Insufficient retention makes part of the footage unusable at the very moment it is needed, sometimes several days after the event. A single server, with no backup, exposes the site to an interruption in surveillance whose length depends on hardware lead times. Neither point tends to be visible as long as nothing goes wrong.
It is worth noting that extending retention must remain consistent with the declared retention period and with the rules applicable to premises open to the public: the additional capacity provides technical headroom, but it does not remove the need to decide on the duration actually configured. In the same way, the updates were prepared on a parallel server precisely in order to avoid testing a new version on a system in live operation.
