COPS Monitoring, Williamstown, N.J., announced Nashville, Tenn., will be the host city for its fourth alarm monitoring central station. Scheduled for a first-quarter 2011 opening date, the 4,100 square-foot facility will be interconnected with their three other central stations located in New Jersey, Florida, and Arizona to perform active load-sharing of the company’s alarm traffic. COPS intends to have its Tennessee central station UL-listed, and will operate the facility 24/7.

“I am excited about the Tennessee central station. It’s the next step in our commitment to service reliability and regional presence,” stated Jim McMullen, president and COO of COPS Monitoring. “Not only will our new facility increase our reliability from a technical standpoint, it also broadens our staffing capabilities and helps to maintain quality of service in the event that local conditions prevent dispatchers from staffing our other centers.” McMullen added, “Rather than operating one or two mega-centers, we believe that opening regional central stations allows us to increase our local presence and expand on our commitment to providing ‘hometown central station’ service.”

In addition, COPS contracted with Zumasys, a solutions provider for disaster recovery, server virtualization, and centralized storage, to deploy its fourth and fifth automation system mainframes in a highly secure off-site mega data center, called the SuperNAP (Network Access Provider), in Las Vegas, Nev. The additional servers will supplement the company’s three redundant mainframes located in its New Jersey headquarters.

The SuperNAP is a 407,000-square-foot computing facility made of steel-reinforced concrete, protected by armed guards, accessible via multiple communications providers, and backed up by five custom-built power generators. The SuperNAP is reported to be the world’s most energy-efficient, high-density, ultra-scale data center and houses servers and storage systems owned by many of the world’s most prominent companies, COPS said.

“In addition to the ability to monitor our dealers’ alarms from any of our strategically located central stations, we can also process signals from our mainframes located at the SuperNAP,” stated McMullen. “We’re sparing no expense when it comes to our ability to provide essential monitoring services. The great thing is that all of our dealers, regardless of size, benefit from our mission to be the most consistent and reliable service provider in the industry,” he said.