The control room solutions of today are far more advanced and intricate than they were ten years ago, when the traditional video wall looked out across individual workstations, with information collated to view on a single, large canvas.
Today, the number of sources and feeds coming into a control room is likely to be dozes, if not hundreds.
Add the need to manage and share this content to the right people across numerous displays, workstations or even locations, and the challenges become very real. It’s crucial to ensure that you consider several key factors when choosing how to create your control room design.
We’ve included 5 of the most significant considerations below.
Download our comprehensive white paper on Control Room Design
1. Design and speed of monitoring
Control rooms are complex environments. It should never be underestimated how important sufficient planning and preparation is if you want the environment to function effectively.
Operators need to quickly deal with a broad range of information, helping them monitor, collaborate, and react quickly. The failure to offer this in the solution could ultimately render it useless.
Solutions like Datapath’s Aetria can manage hundreds of sources, enabling distribution of content to individual workstations and video walls. This in turn allows control room operators to quickly identify and resolve issues.
All these sources require real-time monitoring and control for smooth operation and swift decision making in times of crisis.
It’s vital that the information presented to operators offers the best possible means for effective decision making. The solution needs to work smoothly behind the scenes to ensure operators are free to focus on their primary objectives.
All of this can be achieved with the correct design, which is turn offers the speed of monitoring.
2. The right technology setup
It’s crucial that control room operators are given clear visibility and simple control of the various sources and applications they use in their day-to-day work. An operators main tool is the technology provided within the solution.
Take Aetria’s KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) functionality, which enables operators to instantly switch between any source in real-time, connecting with multiple different technologies, whilst maintaining full security.
Operators can easily control different sources from their desk in an intuitive way to access and control all of the sources they require at any given time. No need to move between desks or even peripherals.
Aetria helps operators monitor the hundreds of data points required to identify anomalies and network issues.
Centralized connectivity of all operator workstations and shared video walls makes it easy to collaborate and respond quickly to any disruptions. All hardware and software components of the Aetria solution are engineered from the ground up for 24/7 operation.
3. Reliability
Every mission-critical control room application must have a fail-safe supply that delivers every time, around the clock.
Visual data has to be sent and received in real time, in an entirely efficient way, to ensure operations can run continuously.
A solution needs to balance managing the increasing quantities of sources, content and data, with maintaining total reliability and usability for the operator.
Offering this always on reliability should be a key consideration, no matter the project.
4. Flexibility
The modern control room has an influx of visual data. As such, operators need a solution which provides flexibility to view multiple sources on their local workstation screens.
The right solution, like Aetria’s unified interface, ingests hundreds of sources, which can then be categorized and displayed on operator screens and video walls for constant monitoring and collaboration in a way they can use.
An operator will need to ensure that their workstation allows them to display any combination of sources available alongside their main desktop and local applications. That is why Aetria ensures flexibility to route multiple copies of sources to any workstation or video wall in the control room.
Are you offering a completely flexible control room solution?
5. User interface
The control room operator interacts with the user interface day in, day out. It needs to work for them.
Take the Aetria Command Center, which possesses a highly intuitive user interface. It enables control room operators to design, manage and operate from their workstation.
This means that operators can focus on their core objectives rather than how to make the technology work, essential in mission critical environments.
Download our comprehensive white paper on Control Room Design
Case Studies
AGMultivision choose Aetria from Datapath for Kyndryl Cyber Operations Center in Rome
Datapath and specialist Italian distributor AGMultivision are proud to announce the completion of an Aetria control room project at one of the world’s largest providers of
Home run: Datapath and Watchfire help Houston Astros knock it out of the park for digital content inside 8,000 sq ft stadium store
Datapath, world leader in video processing and control room solutions, is delighted to announce its award-winning VSN video wall controller series has been selected
Datapath VSN processing powers Denver Sportsbook Bar & Grill
Colorado System Integrator Logic Integration chose Datapath to bring a new video dimension to the Sportsbook Bar & Grill in Denver, integrating a VSN1172 into an