NCP has unified its regional control centres into a single nationwide, state-of-the-art control room. The company will use the new technology to manage up to 800 car parking sites across the country. They believe the centralised computing architecture will provide enhanced security, high availability and 99.9 percent uptime.
ClearCube, which was founded in Texas in 1997, has teamed up with its partner Bladetec for this project. A solution was devised to host the independent systems on separate PC blades that could switch instantaneously.
For the collaboration to be a success, ensuring the uptime of the control room was critical, as a spokesperson from ClearCube explains: “Now five separate and redundant IT infrastructure systems are provisioned to each control room operator. In the event of a software or hardware failure the position is put back to full use within five minutes.”
Both companies believe that the centralisation of NCP’s customer service and control centre has enabled the organisation to implement a best-fit solution for a modern command and control environment. The software aims to provide NCP IT administrators with visibility and control of local and remote computing deployments.
A new comprehensive management software, “Sentral”, offers IT administrators capabilities like dynamic resource allocation, virtual desktop management, active health monitoring, and PC blade switching & sparing. Sentral can also be leveraged to support virtualised desktops as well as other vendors’ blade systems.
“Before the Croydon Operations Centre, NCP operated seven satellite centres around the UK to control its car parks,” commented Neil Robson, technology director at the car park firm. “The transition to a centralised environment has provided NCP with a highly adaptable computing solution that gives us 100 percent systems availability and significantly simplified IT management.”
The Croydon control centre can now manage all of NCP’s car parks in the UK; overseeing security, payment and customer services operations from one contact point. CCTV at each car park is relayed back to secure operations, while the payment system is linked to all ticket barriers and payment machines. NCP are confident that the integration of all car park operations will allow operators to connect directly to any barrier in any car park with video and voice-feeds to address customers’ problems in real-time.