Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) is a government-owned energy and petroleum company located in Mumbai, India. As one of the largest companies in the world, BPCL marches to the Fortune 500 and Forbes 2000 listing as one of the single digit Indian representatives.

BPCL owns around 40,000 petrol stations throughout India. Every day, there are so many customers coming to the stations for services, and the operation of fuel services is frequent among people on site. To properly safeguard its employees and customers, each petrol station was deployed with surveillance system to monitor the station area. The surveillance system BPCL originally adopted was an analogue system that gradually failed to meet the requirements of flexibility and stable performance when dealing with the enlarged scale of the countrywide petrol stations in terms of security management.

When considering the upgrade BPCL eventually chose the QNAP Viostor NVR VS-2008Pro for its new surveillance system with some major concerns in mind. Firstly, the VS-2008Pro is a Linux-based system supports quick configurations without a PC for monitoring IP cameras over the network. The stand-alone NVR feature greatly benefited operation efficiency for security administrators. Secondly, the ease of system configuration and management surprised BPCL that just a few simple steps were required to complete the setup. This feature was important to BPCL especially in such a large scale deployment as its surveillance upgrade and restructure project was carried out. In addition, the web-based user interface makes system management so simple and convenient that it helps security administrators relieve part of the burden from their daily work and greatly improve their working efficiency. Finally, the VS-2008Pro supports multi-server monitoring. Thanks to the Intel Atom processor, the VS-2008Pro provides exceptional performance, allowing better scalability by connecting to other Viostor NVRs to monitor up to 128 channels. This Intel-inside model provides extreme flexibility to BPCL on the surveillance deployment based on different milestones of the project and, at the same time, allows easy surveillance expansion in terms of affordable hardware investment in the long-term.

All in all, the VS-2008Pro earns the heart of BPCL as a turnkey solution for long-term recording and heavy megapixel recording. In the first stage of this project, BPCL deployed a total of 900 units of the Viostor NVR VS-2008Pro for its petrol stations in India.

The QNAP Viostor NVR VS-2008Pro has successfully turned the BPCL surveillance system into an advanced network appliance and structure, and effectively helped BPCL with the large-scale surveillance tasks for better environmental monitoring and improved employee and customer security at the different petrol stations throughout the country. According to the company BPCL also gained many benefits in aspect of management, including 20-25% cost reduction of operation and administration of each petrol station and 15-20% increase in productivity. Moreover, it fulfilled an enhanced central monitoring facility from the head office, resulting in more efficient surveillance management.