Marathon and Johnson Controls, Inc. Provide 24*7 Airport Security
THE AIRPORT
Nearly 6,000 travelers pass through Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan each day. More than two million passengers traveled it in 2005. Takeoffs and landings in 2005 totaled more than 112,000 - an average of over 300 a day, making Gerald R. Ford International Airport the 88th busiest commercial airport in the nation and the second busiest airport in Michigan. More than 2,000 people work at the airport, the majority being employed by airport tenants
“The Marathon solution for P2000, offers us the extremely high level of availability we need for our critical access control system at the airport.”
THE SECURITY SYSTEM
When Gerald R. Ford International Airport needed a security system to provide access control at the airport, they decided to implement a Johnson Controls P2000 based solution.
The Johnson Controls P2000 system provides an effective foundation for mission-critical security needs. Operators can perform functions easily – the system is based on the Microsoft� Windows� Server 2003 operating system. An underlying Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database offers high performance without high overhead. The system operator can access an interactive, real time facility map, featuring dynamic icons, to monitor and control access points.
THE NEED FOR CONTINUOUS OPERATION
Because of the critical nature of this system, the Gerald R. Ford International Airport had to ensure that the Windows based P2000 system would be guaranteed to run with extremely high availability. Downtime of this server based solution could not be tolerated because the system must comply with Transportation Security Regulation Part 1542. This regulation requires that the doors are monitored 100% of the time. As a result the specification required continuous operation 24*7*365. After a fair amount of effort with clustering solutions, these options were found to be cumbersome and not sufficient to pass the required tests.
THE MARATHON CHOICE
JCI and Gerald R. Ford International Airport turned to Marathon Technologies for its everRun FT solution, which allows the airport to configure two Windows servers under the control of the Marathon everRun FT software. The system was set up in a very short time and passed the required tests immediately.
MARATHON DELIVERS FAULT TOLERANCE
everRun FT synchronizes two standard Windows servers to create a virtual application environment that runs a single license of P2000 on both servers simultaneously. If a device or even an entire server fails, P2000 continues to operate uninterrupted. All redundancies and failures are completely transparent to the applications and users.
Applications are installed, run, managed and accessed through the single virtual server, eliminating the need to license, install and manage multiple copies as required in clustering and failover situations.
THE RESULTS
“The Marathon solution for P2000, offers us the extremely high level of availability we need for our critical access control system at the airport”, said Mr. Rob Benstein, Public Safety and Operations Director of Gerald R. Ford International Airport.
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