The RTPD maintains fingerprint files on over two million convicted criminals and suspects. They are classified by the Hendry Method. These files reside in hard copy form at RTPD headquarters in Bangkok. Every day, 200 well-trained officers search 2,700 search-requested fingerprint cards through the fingerprint files. In addition, matching a fingerprint found at the scene of a crime with those in the files (Latent Search) is very time-consuming and often does not produce a match.
To speed up this matching/searching process and increase the probability of a successful match, RTPD initiated an Automated Fingerprint Identification System project to store all ten fingerprints of criminals and suspects in a central database along with other information on the modus operandi of each person. Special software utilizes data from the crime scene to establish a profile against which the database is searched. Often a match can be found by searching as few as a thousand records (rather than two million). To protect the privacy of individuals in the database, no names or other identifiers are provided to those making the search, except when that record matches the crime scene print.
Installation of computer equipment to manage the fingerprint system began in early 1995. Images of two and a half million hard copy fingerprints are being scanned and loaded into the database. At the final stage, the daily maximum system load would be able to search 4,500 search-requested fingerprint cards through a four and a half million record database. Bangkok, a city of over ten million people, will be the first to use the system, which will eventually expand to all areas of Thailand.
Most requests will come from police departments throughout Thailand; a high-speed wide-area-network will speed communications between remote departments and the central RTPD database. Large Storage Configurations, Inc. (LSC) was selected to provide the network storage server for this application because it was the only system that met all the requirements for the storage server portion of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System project. The LSC solution included its Integrated Data Server (IDS) hardware, Storage and Archive Manager File System (SAM0FS) software and 1.2 terabytes of magnetic and optical storage. The customer needed a system that could store several million large records (each record is 100-200 kilobytes) and randomly access any record quickly in an on-line transaction environment. Requests to the fingerprint database are expected to exceed 5,000 per day (one every 5 seconds), on average.
Performance is a major issue when accessing archival storage containing millions of large records. Because the IDS/SAM system supports flexible, efficient tree structures on optical media, LSC was able to design a structure that met the department's needs by greatly accelerating the search and retrieval of selected files.
The IDS/SAM System also provides for disaster recovery with LSC's Fast File Recovery System. The system can recover a file system of unlimited size in a matter of minutes, stores all archived data in industrry-standard recording formats and contains complete information for restoring the data on that media.
For more information on storage solutions from LSC, call 1-800-831-9482.
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