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New Age Video
Getting The Big Picture On Storage, Security, Connectivity & BandwidthThe Latest from SIW
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By Tim O'Leary
It's becoming harder to believe that VCRs were once the only option for CCTV recording and storage. Digital video recorders (DVRs) revolutionized the industry by putting the process into the digital domain, addressing several issues with respect to reliability, storage capacity, connectivity and
Just in case you have forgotten, VCRs are electromechanical. Consequently, they suffer from the issues that plague all things with wheels, belts and gears. Additionally storage capacity in a VCR is limited by the size of the videocassette and recording speeds. In the lexicon of VCRs and videocassettes, the term connectivity amounted to duplicating cassettes and physically conveying them to other VCRs.
Fast Foward to Third Generation
Network video recorders (NVRs) using IP network video are the third generation—the next step in this evolution of more cost-effective and space-efficient solutions for viewing and storing video. IP-based digital encoders put video onto the network for storage processing and viewing.
The nature of these new techniques permits total or incremental transition from analog to digital technology.
As video moves into the networked world, it permits the use of other IT technologies such as network-attached storage and storage area networks. Rather than individual hard drives, larger systems are using dedicated high-density storage servers which can share their video with anyone anywhere on the network.
Reliability is another benefit of Internet technology. For example IP can automatically redirect video traffic to a backup storage system in the event of a power failure or network outage. Storage devices can be configured into fault tolerant arrays which backup data and enable hot swapping to ensure uninterrupted service.
The convergence of voice, video, and data traffic over a shared network introduces heightened concern over ensuring efficient, reliable application performance, particularly latency-sensitive traffic like Video-over-IP.
