Genetec believes that long-term system care and maintenance is crucial to any security system. The Security Center’s new health monitoring feature manages and monitors the health of the security platform, from servers and client applications to edge devices and more. Through real-time health monitoring, security and IT departments can increasingly take proactive and preventative action. New tasks, such as health history and health statistics reports, provide valuable information about past and current performance of the unified security platform.

Another key addition to the Security Center is its forward and backward compatibility. Customers are now able to upgrade their main server, while leaving their client applications and other server applications at a previous version. This powerful feature facilitates system upgrades, giving Genetec’s customers the freedom and flexibility to upgrade at their own pace and with limited impact on current operations. The Security Center also supports forward compatibility of its Federation feature. The central monitoring server of a large virtual system can remain at its current version, while remote independent systems can be upgraded to the most current version of Security Center with no impact on central monitoring and reporting.

While supporting standard off-the-shelf clustering solutions, the Security Center now offers its very own embedded directory high availability for the highest level of reliability at a fraction of the cost. More than simply providing automated failover capabilities, the directory high availability feature also supports an application-connection load balancing mechanism to ensure system load is seamlessly distributed amongst several available servers. “With this release, Genetec has devoted a substantial amount of effort to facilitate and enrich deployment, maintenance, and long-term product care functionalities. This latest release will allow customers to phase in their upgrades, as well as continuously monitor the health and up-time of their system beyond what is typically available in the industry today,” says Jimmy Palatsoukas, Senior Product Manager at Genetec. “We are striving to redefine what health monitoring, maintenance, and reliability mean to the security industry and we’ve just taken another important step towards this end with Security Center 5.1.”

Among the major additions related to video surveillance, customers will find video trickling, uninterrupted video streaming, and auxiliary archiver. Video trickling efficiently retrieves video from IP cameras and encoders with edge-recording capabilities; video is retrieved on demand or on schedule for longer term storage within Genetec archiving servers. Uninterrupted video streaming is yet another powerful feature from Genetec that ensures video continues to stream to Security Center client applications even after the main server or other critical components are unreachable. The auxiliary archiver feature presents complimentary functionality to main archivers; it allows organizations to record video from cameras already being recorded by main archivers, but on alternate recording schedules and settings.

Security Center 5.1 also sports a new global cardholder management feature which presents end users with the infrastructure for synchronising cardholders, credentials and other data between remote independent sites with a central location. Organisations can use this feature to administer their cardholder population centrally and improve efficiency. Likewise, this enterprise-class feature empowers organisations to equip cardholders with a single card for all their facilities; assigning multiple credentials per cardholder is now a thing of the past. The Security Center’s Active Directory (AD) integration can now handle connections to multiple AD servers, ideal for large-scale implementations of AD or multi-tenant applications. Finally, AD integration now supports the synchronization of AD attributes to cardholder custom fields.