Exotic environment
The jungle paths wind their way through the rainforest, round 500 different types of plants, 14-m high trees, under waterfalls and over a mangrove swamp in temperatures of 28 °C with close to 60 % humidity.
In the world's largest freestanding hall, 66,000 m² and five million m³ of interior space, the Tropical Islands Resort Berlin-Brandenburg is an authentic man-made tropical landscape. The huge hall with its 10,000 m² of rainforest and housing Europe's largest covered water stage is able to accommodate approximately 7,000 people at one time. This Tropical Islands Resort deploys MOBOTIX cameras to ensure the safety of their guests and the general security of the premises as well as enhancing the attractiveness of their web sites, marketing and advertising.
System Administrator Christian Heinrich recalls, "When we first became interested in web cams, we checked a competitor's product and found that it wasn't nearly as flexible, but much more expensive. At that point, we realized that MOBOTIX is exactly what we needed to meet our needs. And we've remained loyal customers ever since."
Flexibility
This camera system has to do much more than just watch what happens in the hall. A number of different public authorities and the company guidelines require that the facility is monitored at critical points for safety purposes, in the area where guests spend the night in small, rented igloo tents, for example. 
The security staff also uses the MOBOTIX cameras to keep a close eye on all the places where money transactions take place: at the check-out and in merchandising, at the cash counters and in the safes.
More than just access control
Access control also plays an important role: the staff entrance, the delivery gate, some approach routes to the facility and the server rooms are also monitored by MOBOTIX technology. In each location, the cameras have to perform multiple tasks at once - for example to monitor what vehicles enter the facility while record statistical data with the help of license-plate recognition, not only for security reasons but also for planning marketing strategy as it makes it possible to identify which regions the guests come from.
The entire system is based on a complex network with different WLANs. "Each camera in our system has its own DHCP address, which is managed by the network," explains Christian Heinrich. "As a result, we can easily change the location of the individual cameras because the system is able to identify them directly and to connect them automatically."
The wide range of recording opportunities provided by the MOBOTIX solution is also a great advantage. "We need these features in order to be able to clear up any irregularities after the fact," Christian Heinrich says. "We use the memory already integrated in the cameras as well as two redundant file servers, each of which has a capacity of 500 GB." With the help of a ring buffer, the camera images are stored on the servers for 28 days. Some of the cameras are event-controlled so that only the images triggered by an event are recorded. That saves a lot of valuable hard-disk capacity.
"The MOBOTIX cameras offer us amazing opportunities and a great deal of flexibility," the system administrator continues. "The great value for money was another point that had us convinced and that's why we decided to stick with this technology." Plans have now been made to monitor the outside offices and other access routes - of course, again using MOBOTIX cameras.
