During ISC East 2009, recent technology firm start-up IPVision Software was exhibiting in the booth for Hirsch Electronics, and former Cisco, AgentVi and Verint employee Mark Kolar was there along with IPVision’s CEO and founder Mark Felberg to shake up the world of NVRs and VMS solutions.

IPVision Software, it seems, has a new approach to video management and video recording which throws out the server model we’re all used to. To quote from of IP Vision Software’s own documents, “..DVRs and NVRs suffer from using an approach to recording that is rooted in 50-year-old technology. All live and recorded video must go through the recorder, creating a costly, DVR/NVR server intensive bottleneck.”

What IPVision wants to do is run the software so that it takes advantage of smart cameras which can manage their own recording functions by allowing those cameras to talk directly to the recording medium. The idea is that the camera sends data directly to the network attached storage (NAS) or storage area networks (SAN). The result is that the IT or security department doesn’t have to buy DVRs or NVRs, but can instead buy less expensive NAS devices. To put this in perspective, on NewEgg.com, 1 or 2 terabyte networked attached storage units go for a few hundred dollars (and even less for simple network attached drives). By comparison, you’d likely drop thousands of dollars simply for an NVR.

What the IPVision Software does is run as a video management system (they call it the “Virtual Video Recorder (VVR)”. The VVR only controls access to the video and indexes the video rather than running like most video management solutions on a server or NVR, controlling the video recording process. The idea is that this keeps the system imminently scalable. That model with the software can allow users to buy fewer servers, and Felberg and Kolar’s numbers indicate that this can lead to a 57 percent lower total cost of ownership for a 10-site deployment using eight high-definition cameras per site.

At the ISC East 2009 show, the technology was being shown in the booths of Hirsch Electronics (an access control company whose solutions integrated with a number of video systems) and SecureWatch24. Both companies plan to OEM the IPVision Software system.

The solution is primarily focused for third party “smart” cameras that can manage their own video recording, but Kolar noted that it also supported the use of legacy cameras and encoders, although this would require a different configuration than the management of smart cameras.