Protect Your Assets with Scale-Out Storage Solutions for Video Surveillance
For many years, video storage has remained the primary weapon of the security industry. And for all of those years that was perfectly adequate. Conventional video surveillance deployments recorded video to a digital video recorder (DVR) or network video recorder (NVR).
They didn’t necessitate a lot of specialized skills to operate in small numbers. Such systems are manageable by most personnel with a little training. However, at scale, these surveillance systems quickly become complicated and challenging to manage. In addition to that, they’re slow and notoriously unreliable.
NVR surveillance systems offer a host of advantages over the old DVR analog systems but demand careful design and proper deployment to guarantee the highest cost-efficiency. One of the things that affect the value of surveillance digital video recorders (SDVRs) is storage capacity, which can be quite vital and readily misapplied.
Types of Digital Video Surveillance and Required Storage Needs
Video surveillance technology has come a long way since the days of stationary black and white cameras and bulky VHF cassette tapes. As camera technology and design advance, operators are faced with new challenges, primarily dealing with storage capacity.
Capabilities such as more active cameras, higher video resolution, prolonged archival periods and intelligence video analytics (human and vehicle detection and counting, zone intrusion, face recognition, ALPR/ANPR, etc.) cannot be realized without an abundance of storage capacity.
In traditional computing situations, hard drive capacity is usually viewed quantitatively – the amount of data the storage system can hold, for example. However, when considering SDVR solutions, drive capacity represents a crucial component in determining the quantity and quality of video data a system can store.
Since 24×7 video streams are the essence of SDVRs, they need adequate storage capacity to deliver superior performance and efficiency in a particular security environment. To achieve this, three key video parameters must be met:
- Quantity: The number of video streams and their duration
- Quality: The quality of the video streams is represented by frames per second (fps) and frame resolution (in pixels)
- Archiving: The period of time video streams are saved
The development of 4K (3840 x 2160 or 4096 x 2160), 8K (7680 x 4320 pixels – 4320p) and super high-quality HD IP NVR systems have pushed the necessity for high-performance storage solutions.
The Importance of Scale-Out Architectures in Video Surveillance Storage
Scaling out (horizontal scaling) your video surveillance data support system growth and flexibility, which is a plus considering how varying performance implications can be. Grow your video surveillance system seamlessly and effortlessly: add more surveillance cameras, devices or increase resolution and frame rates.
Adding to that, a scale-out architecture empowers your surveillance system to run video motion detection with analytics while utilizing the power of smart search across every video stream. Distributed, scale-out topology also offers advanced failover features at a much lower cost than scale-up systems.
Video Surveillance Must be Flexible, Scalable and Affordable
With the way, and the rate, at which various technologies are improving and new ones developed, three things are crucial when investing in something like video surveillance solutions: flexibility, scalability and affordability. As for CCTV data storage systems, they must be capable of enabling adaptable scalability of the video surveillance infrastructure – as a whole.
And when it comes down to affordability, StorNext-based solutions for video surveillance are scalable in both capacity and performance at a lower cost. This is achieved by allowing you to increase your primary storage with scalable, more cost-efficient tiers of storage. Our solution is perfect for organizations with vast volumes of video and the hurdles that arise when trying to scale storage with your data growth.
Based on your personalized plan, StorNext automatically transfers data over tiers of storage when necessary. In other words, tiering allows less-frequently used video data to be transferred to the most cost-effective storage with the best-in-call data coherence.
Additionally, StorNext is remarkably effective at conserving storage space: StorNext Deduplication diminishes storage demands by establishing a redundancy index based on all data being deduplicated. Then you have StorNext Replication, as “asynchronous, host-based replication feature that is highly flexible and configurable.”
A few other excellent benefits of deploying a StorNext-based solution include:
- Scale-out storage virtualization
- High-performance data sharing
- Collaboration across Linux, Windows, UNIX and Mac OSX operating systems
- Massively scalable archive
- Online tiering and archiving
- File system capacity optimization
- Global data protection and data distribution
RAID Inc. + StorNext Solutions
To learn more about our StorNext-based solutions and how they can enhance your video surveillance system, contact us today to learn more. If your existing video surveillance system isn’t fulfilling your expectations or you’re interested in a new video surveillance system, contact us today so that we may help you.
