Linear Systems developed the DIMS software, and integrates it with industry-standard hardware. Customers include police departments around the country. One example is the system at the Anaheim Police Department, shown here.
Everything in DIMS is based on standards, Parsons said. For instance, he said, homicide records need to be stored forever, while other types of images have their own lifestyles.
"Ninety percent of agencies using digital imaging are not in compliance with standards," Parsons said. "Anaheim is one of those on top of standards for controlling access, logging in who does what. There is a lot of liability out there if things get released, a lot of ambulance chasers out there looking for those kinds of opportunities.
The APD uses digital cameras with 8 million pixels of resolution. All photos have to be stored in their native resolution, without compression, to ensure that no tampering has been done, Conley said.
Each raw photo is about 66 MBytes in size. To speed up officers' work, a working copy of each photo is also made at a reduced size of 12 MBytes. Two copies of the raw photo and two copies of the working copy are stored, one each in this DIMS system, and one off-site.
"Everything is duplicated off-site," Parsons said. "Disaster recovery is important. A lot of agencies haven't thought a lot about things like this."
The server is a custom-built model based on Intel quad-core processors. Linear Systems' software, which is based on a specialized distribution tuned to image management, was just re-compiled to run on the quad-core, and is now being tested to work with dual quad-core processor servers.
The arrays are custom-built using a southern California-based system builder that Linear Systems declined to name, and include RAID controllers from QLogic, of Aliso Viejo, Calif. that can be configured for RAID 50 or RAID 60. "They're pretty expensive," Monteros said. "The builder uses a special power supply for us that can handle a high load with bigger mean time between failure."
Linear is also modifying its software with a new module to handle the storage, retrieval, and archiving of audio files to go with the digital photographs and other records, Monteros said.
