Lenovo and Pivot3, a provider of ‘hyper-converged infrastructure’ solutions, have struck a deal to develop and sell edge computing products for smart city security. The city of Bogota, in Colombia, has already hooked up 3,000 surveillance cameras to their new system.
Much of the growth in the smart city market is driven by mission-critical security initiatives, reliant on an array of sensors and databases, in conjunction with video analytics, including facial recognition, behavioural analysis, and licence plate recognition tools.
Edge computing is essential for cities to collect and analyse this data in real time, and back it up for further analysis.
The new ‘integrated appliances’ from Lenovo and Pivot3 combine Lenovo’s ThinkSystem servers and Pivot3 hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software. The combined solution provides simple, robust, and affordable edge computing, they said.
Wilfredo Sotolongo, vice president and general manager of IoT at Lenovo’s data centre group, said: “Lenovo and Pivot3 are enabling the next generation of edge computing, where governments and organisations can leverage machine learning and analytics to better protect the people they serve.
“Through this partnership, we provide customers a solution to centrally manage their distributed edge devices – with faster video ingest rates, higher resiliency and smaller, space conscious appliances.”
Bruce Milne, chief marketing officer and general manager at Pivot3, commented: “Pivot3 and Lenovo support customers with streamlined service delivery, automation and efficiency.
“Customers are seeing incredible impact from our HCI solutions that are optimised for mission-critical safe city, IoT and edge computing, and we’re pleased to further expand that impact with Lenovo’s market influence, distribution and accelerated go-to-market strategies.”
IHS Markit reckons the global market for security equipment in the city surveillance sector surpassed $3 billion in 2017, and will grow at an average rate of 14.6 per cent through 2021.
The city of Bogota, in Colombia, has deployed its new edge computing solution as part of a refresh of its surveillance and monitoring system, which comprises 1,000 cameras from different vendors.
Its camera network is being run via a central control centre, from which four visualisation locations operated by police will be served. The Lenovo-Pivot3 technology has since been selected for another 2,000 cameras within the city’s 18 boroughs.
“Bogota is now able to seamlessly scale performance requirements as surveillance needs grow,” said Lenovo.
Rafael Padilla, systems integrator for Bogota’s ‘safe city’ project, commented: “With this new scalable edge computing solution, the city’s security team can view any camera, regardless of brand across the city from a single location, which will greatly simplify operations.”
Lenovo is offering cities proof-of-concept testing of the product at its various innovation centres.
