Blog Archives
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Overview of RAID for IP Video Storage
By Ronen Isaac - Saturday February 26, 2011
Storage is a big part of IP video security and so I thought I would start a small series of video storage starting with the basics. Today we will discuss RAID. RAID has been discussed many (x4) times throughout the years but I still get questions about it. What is it, what is the best choice for RAID for my VMS, etc. So here we go. There are 4 major types of RAID 0, 1, 5 & 6. There are then combinations of two of the above like RAID 10, 50 & 60. We will discuss each briefly. JBOD: JBOD stands for "Just a Bunch Of Disks" and basically means that NO RAID has been implemented. This is how disks begin and you will then implement RAID on a JBOD storage array. RAID 0: RAID 0 stripes data across multiple... -
Outdoor 802.11n has arrived
By Ronen Isaac - Wednesday October 14, 2009Now that 802.11n is ratified we are starting to see a rush of products come to market. Of the the outdoor ones are the really interesting to me and probably to you since wireless IP cameras are mostly used outdoors where cabling is difficult. Why is 802.11n so great for us IP camera installers? Its the throughput! 802.11n has a datarate of 300Mbps as opposed to its predecessor 802.11g which caps out at 54Mbps. So in real numbers manufacturers are boasting UDP throughput numbers of anywhere from 100 - 180 Mbps of actual usable throughput and TCP numbers are less than that but still far above 20 Mbps which is the average 802.11g max. More throughput means the following: - More IP cameras accommodated on one access-point... -
Wireless Beamforming is so cool
By Ronen Isaac - Friday September 11, 2009
I have been saying this for a little over a year now but someone finally started testing the theory that wireless beamforming (if done correctly) is really cool. Tom's Hardware has produced a great and seriously in depth article about beamforming and how it effects wireless propagation, speed and connectivity. It features Ruckus Wireless , Cisco and Aruba access points. Traditionally omni directional onmi antennas were made of a simple material that when radiated at a certain frequency produced "signal amplification" which made your wireless signal travel farther. This worked really well but came with certain downfalls. Wasted energy: Traditional omni-directional antennas "amplify" the wireless signal in a 360 degree... -
Some thoughts on Public Surveillance RFPs
By Ronen Isaac - Monday August 17, 2009I was looking at the latest public RFP for a wireless IP video surveillance solution and this RFP, like most, left me wondering why the protocol has remained as it has. Mainly: What was being asked for would require a small data center just to house the storage environment for all the recorded video. The throughput necessary to make this work is so large that a muni-mesh wireless network would require a huge supporting network of wired and wireless backhauls or throughput injection points (see my previous blog on building a mesh network), making it unfeasible under any reasonable circumstances. In principal I understand that public safety can't miss a beat and that the smallest bit of video can mean the difference between... -
Gigabit wireless backhaul for IP video
By Ronen Isaac - Sunday August 9, 2009You may or may not have head of millimeter wave or E-band gigabit wireless bridges but they have been around for several years now and are quite proven. We recently installed a pair of these bridges at one of our clients and are extremely impressed by the real world throughput of the link. Using a short range version of Bridgewave 60GHz line up, the GE60, we managed to connect two buildings approximately 800 ft apart, in the middle of Los Angeles with impressive results. The promised throughput was 1Gbps and I bring this up because throughput is king when deploying IP video solutions and this millimeter wave gigabit bridging can greately reduce deployment time and reduce installation costs (no trenching etc) of a large... -
Deploying Wireless Mesh - How it all comes together
By Ronen Isaac - Tuesday June 30, 2009
Wireless Mesh seems to still be misunderstood so I though I would put down a couple of pointers explaining how it works at a high level and focusing on throughput of course, we are talking about video here... Wireless mesh networks require a good amount of planning and unfortunately are not as easy to deploy properly, as most vendors would like you to think, but can be useful for specific applications. Here is a top down diagram of the different parts of a wireless mesh network. A wireless mesh network normally spans a large area of land and therefore requires a distributed architecture in order to make it work. The diagram above attempts to break down the typical components of a wireless mesh network. You may notice... -
What is a Distributed Surveillance Environment?
By Ronen Isaac - Thursday April 2, 2009
I have been wanting to write about this for a while now. A distributed surveillance network is simply when you have your recording servers distributed across multiple geographic locations instead of having one central recording locaiton. Benefits of a distributed environement: Ability to record remote cameras in real time, no delay Massive reduction of WAN usage becuase only video streams that are being viewed are pulled from the remote server Redundancy: If the WAN link goes down remote server keeps recording Redundancy: If one server in the network fails all others continue recording so you have minimal loss Massive increase in performance: No one network is saturated. Resources are shared... -
100Gbps Ethernet - Seriously I can't wait
By Ronen Isaac - Wednesday April 1, 2009I am very excited to finally get to blog on the new SIW v2.0. Lately I have been reading about the development of 100Gbps Ethernet and its getting me excited. Today there are excellent VMS platforms, like Milestone Systems XProtect or ONSSI, that allow you to set up distributed surveillance environments to monitor multiple locations from a single interface BUT the one factor limiting its widespread adoption is bandwidth. Lets face it if you are not careful a ADSL, business cable or even a T1 line will easily be eaten up by just a few cameras but imagine if instead of a 768Kbps or 1.5Mbps upload speed you had 20Mbps or 40Mbps or 100Mbps. Well, we are getting close. Today we have MetroEthernet providers delivering high speed... -
"Wireless-ify" any IP Camera
By Ronen Isaac - Tuesday February 17, 2009So I would first like to apologize for being out of the loop for what feels like eternity. We have been busy pushing out our new website , I was out at the Milestone MIPS '09 for a week and of course there were other less interesting things going on as well. So glad to be back and I hope you are all well! I want to show you a trick to"wireless-ify" any IP camera you currently own or can commercially purchase. I am going to give away some simple secrets here so listen up. There are many ways to do this so I will show you the top 3. Please refer to this legend as you look through the diagrams. 1. This is the simplest and probably most widely used to wireless-ify 1 camera Camera --> Crossover Cable --> Wireless... -
Not So Intelligent CCTV: Part 1
By Ronen Isaac - Tuesday January 6, 2009Sorry I haven't written in so long but my new wife and I finally went on our honeymoon to South America. It was a great time. We went to a sleepy town called Buzios in Brazil and then to Buenos Aires and Mendoza in Argentina. Each city had its own charm and culture but they all had one thing in common HUGE wireless towers. You can tell you are obsessed when you have beauty all around you and you are constantly looking up in the sky. But I digress... In Buenos Aires we stayed at the only "large" hotel on our trip. It was almost 200 rooms with a full business center, modern amenities, etc but the Internet was very slow so I couldn't write this while I was there. I did noticed however that the hotel had a...
