AVM has carried out an upgrade for a key client in the banking sector, refitting its Data Operations Centre in the north of England with a new Christie video wall.

The South YorkshireGroup Data Centre in Barnsley is the Command Centre for all the bank EMEA region activities where operations are close monitored.

While AVM already has the maintenance and support contract for the bank’s offices around the UK, the integrators still needed to win a competitive tender against three other AV companies (and other data wall manufacturers).

“Our technical team had originally approached several different companies to see what they could deliver and found Christie was the best of what we wanted, within the budget,” said David Whitehouse, the Bank’s Data Centre Operations Team Leader.

The AVM proposal, based around ten rear-projection Entero CSP50XP 50” SXGA+ 1-chip DLP LED illuminated cubes — delivered with CrossPrism high viewing angle screens and optimised by a Christie TVC-1210 Digital Display Wall Controller — thus formed the winning bid.

With solid state LED technology replacing traditional mercury arc lamp based systems, the rear projection engine is virtually maintenance free for long term performance and 24/7 reliability while the new TVC-1210 controller features the latest Intel® Xeon® single quad-core ultra-fast processing technology.  

The server-based system features high performance multi-video capability (with up to 16 real-time videos per display) and the flexibility to accept multiple external video, RGB and client desktops for display anywhere and any size. 

David Whitehouse says that by replacing the previous single static wall display, they have created additional versatility. “The wall is running 24/7 and we can now build up different applications whereas a lot of software simply couldn’t be used with the previous wall,” he said.

The bank runs its own bespoke software from servers in the Data Centre. This enables them to carry out surveillance on around 1100 systems — mostly in Europe — with a further 300 shortly being fed into the system from London. “This will give us 1400 systems to manage by next year, with operations running on many platforms, including IBM mainframe, AS/400 and so on,” said Mr. Whitehouse.