As the use and applications of video surveillance data continue to grow with the expanding migration to IP, so has the burden on networks to be able to support myriad analytic applications while simultaneously continuing to ingest and store footage. The fact is, however, most organizations simply don’t have the bandwidth necessary to undergird all of this increased functionality while still meeting adequate performance standards without making a significant investment in their infrastructure.
To help alleviate these issues, video storage solutions provider Quantum recently introduced its new Xcellis Application Director which enables end-users to run video management system or analytic applications with directly attached storage. According to Wayne Arvidson, vice president, surveillance and security solutions at Quantum, there are two general use cases for the new server. First, it allows those who leverage the company’s tiered storage architecture to run real-time VMS or analytic applications by helping to reduce a lot of the network traffic that is typical in environments with large numbers of cameras. Secondly, for smaller surveillance deployments that don’t necessarily need tiered storage or aren’t quite ready to make that jump, Arvidson says it enables them to enjoy the same level functionality while also being able to connect directly with their QXS Series disk storage solutions and scale as their storage needs require.
“Typically, people are solving that now by using some type of appliance-based device and as I need scalability I’ve got to add more appliances or they are adding direct attached storage behind some generic server and if they want to enter a tiered environment, they have to create a completely different infrastructure. With our offering, they’ve got the ability to repurpose this hardware into that tiered infrastructure and then make it part of that tiered dataset,” Arvidson explains. “For us, it expands the type of customer that has access to our technology. Traditionally, from an economic perspective, it really made sense [for customers] with 100 cameras and above and this really broadens the portfolio down into that sub-50 up to 100-camera type of environment.”
For those who have a relatively small amount of cameras, such as a small- to medium-sized business, Arvidson says they can use any kind of VMS software package they desire and run it directly on the Xcellis server while storing their footage on one of the aforementioned QXS Series drives. In larger environments, the solution can help end-users meet demanding performance requirements, scale to hundreds of petabytes and integrate easily into existing video surveillance workflows.
Arvidson says Xcellis was really born out of feedback the received from both systems integrators and end-users who were not ready to invest in a tiered storage architecture - warehousing video footage in different formats (primary disk storage, tape-based solutions, the cloud, etc.) based on its perceived value and the expense involved with storing it – but wanted a way to easily migrate to one in the future. There were also many customers, according to Arvidson, who only wanted to have to deal with one vendor to meet their storage needs.
“Having the ability to run the applications and then get the performance advantages of it being directly connected to our storage was an appealing solution to that,” he says. “It is going to help these smaller environments take advantage of the rest of our technology portfolio as they grow over time.”
Arvidson says many of the end-users they speak with really want to increase the length of time their video is retained for but they are hamstrung by the costs involved with that.
“One of the other challenges we’re hearing from folks is that as there is more and more adoption of HD technology, it puts a lot of performance strains on the infrastructure,” Arvidson says. “What they want is a platform that can manage that. And, on the analytics side, [end users] would like to get responses back from analytics a lot closer to real-time as opposed to forensically and that puts a lot of performance constraints on the network. Whatever we can do to do reduce that traffic on the ingest network and make the interaction with storage more efficient, that has a big impact on what you’ve got to deploy from an overall system design.”
Additionally, Arvidson says the reliance of SMBs and others on appliance-based architectures inevitably makes trying to scale a network that much more difficult, which is another issue they hope to solve with the new Xcellis solution.
“That creates management complexity because I’ve got multiple devices to manage and it creates infrastructure complexity because now I’ve got to figure out how to centralize these things,” Arvidson says. “With a single system, we’re giving them that ability to grow from an entry-level application with 40 to 50 cameras all the way into the tens of thousands.”
