IBM systems behind car park crime crack down

NCP is mad for it...

Car park chain NCP is employing IBM technology in its war on crime in Manchester. NCP spent £3m building a control room in Manchester and using CCTV cameras and video streaming technology, backed-up by IBM servers, Manchester City Council and NCP have been able to reduce crime figures in the city's car parks by 45 per cent. Neil Robson, technical director of NCP, told silicon.com: "It's totally different to anything that's been around before. We have a full analogue and digital network running around Manchester to provide information and images to the centre. Everything can then be retrieved from the robust IBM storage system." The high quality of the images means they can be used to make arrests and prosecutions. IBM's role is to provide the storage for the images so they're kept safely and securely and are easily retrievable. There are 400 cameras sending images to the eight IBM eServer xSeries 220 servers and one terabyte of storage space where the images are digitised.