Complex IT infrastructures are today part of the design and architecture of modern surveillance solutions. Servers, storage arrays, network switches and even workstations are now the heart of a surveillance system.
With the rise of high-resolution cameras and security needs such as LPR, facial recog-nition, analytics and access control, the multiplication of IT equipment has pushed system integrators into the game of data centre management, requiring more involvement in the maintenance of the control room due to the complexity of the IT equipment.
An easy approach when designing a surveillance infrastructure is to rely on the bill of materials provided by the surveillance software vendors, thanks to the availability of on-line configuration calculator tools they provide. These tools offer an idea of the quantity of servers, workstations and storage required for a given quantity of cameras, type of site, retention period, etc. In reality, the provided bill of materials is mostly very conservative and out of budget, therefore the project ends up badly qualified, resulting in a long, painful and costly integration exercise.
Designed for surveillance
Another approach is to design the solution not based on commodity hardware, but with solutions coming from vendors exclusively involved in surveillance, and therefore able to design surveillance appliances and technologies specifically for the needs of a surveillance infrastructure. Capsule Technologies is permanently developing and improving technologies, helping to drastically reduce the quantity of hardware without compromising on the performance and the resilience of the solution.
By proposing technologies such as software-defined infrastructure with virtualisation and scale-out storage as foundations, disrupts the dynamic of adding more servers and more storage to fix the problems of an evolving surveillance infrastructure.
A software-defined infrastructure, such as the one proposed by Capsule with CAPS-OS, offers the flexibility of having multiple virtual machines (VM) within a single Capsule Appliance. This appliance offers users a host of features, from failover recording servers to management servers, event servers and even third-party applications (such as video analytics or access control systems) which can be hosted on the additional VMs.
Advantages of virtual machines
In separate VMs, these applications are isolated from each other, creating a safer environment for long term system reliability. Most importantly, the restructuring of the surveillance components into a virtual environment minimises the cost of the IT infrastructure, avoiding the conversion of a control room into a data centre.
Capsule is actively developing for the Bosch and Milestone ecosystems, allying also with IT vendors such as DELL-EMC, Supermicro and Promise to guarantee that end users can obtain more of their surveillance infrastructure within budget, without becoming data centre managers.
Capsule will be demonstrating its solutions for Milestone Xprotect at the Milestone Community Days in Johannesburg the 19th of September and in Cape Town the 22nd of September.
For more information, contact Franck Martinaux, Capsule Technologies, franck@capsule-sa.co.za, www.capsule-sa.co.za
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