5 minute read

Inside Story

from PSI Magazine June 2020

by Western Business Media Limited

from PSI Magazine June 2020, page 6

Industry news

Scalable NVRS – with benefits!

Last month we revealed the new NVR range from Quantum. This time we take a closer look…

“If you think that your application is too big for NVRs and you think you need to look at shared storage, all of a sudden that represents a big step up in installation costs”

Quantum’s new line of Network Video Recording (NVR) servers complement the company’s VS-HCI Series and are offered in both mini-tower and rack-mounted form factors to provide customers with a range of affordable, reliable, and high-performance options for surveillance recording and video management. Quantum’s VST mini-tower NVRs are designed to support the surveillance of retail stores, gas stations, small buildings and campuses, and other small implementations, while Quantum’s VS4160 NVR is one of the most dense and highest capacity NVRs available for environments with large retention requirements.

To support the extreme graphics processing and parallel workload demands of video analytics, Quantum has introduced the VS2108-A analytics server. The VS2108-A can be configured with up to six GPUs in a compact 2U chassis and will accelerate results with leading video analytics software platforms. For access control and building management applications that require a highly available architecture, Quantum is introducing a new highly available application server, the VS1110-A. Quantum’s new VS1110-A Enterprise application server utilizes the same virtual machine (VM) failover capability found in Quantum’s VS-HCI series. Like the VS-HCI series, the VS1110-A server can be monitored remotely via a secure web-based portal, enabling facilities managers, integrators and Quantum support to proactively monitor the system.

Quantum has enhanced the capabilities of the VS-HCI series with secure, remote monitoring via a web-based portal. The Quantum VS-HCI series provides hyper-converged infrastructure for surveillance recording, video management, and building operations. The highly available architecture scales out as video camera counts increase and makes it easy to manage operations by running multiple physical security workloads on a single platform.

We caught up with Curt Wittich of Quantum to find out more about the new series:

What’s different about the new servers? "NVRs are products that are intended to be as simple and easy to use so ther e aren't really as many options to differentiate between all the different systems, but I'd say we are going to be competitive with any of the other NVRs on the market particularly in the 1U and 2U rack space formats. However on the larger 4U size we've got a super dense 60 drive product meaning we can go up to eight hundred terabytes usable in a single 4U footprint and I haven't seen that from anyone else in this space. We also go down in size to the mini towers for retail locations, banking etc.

“We have cloud-based analytics technology, that has featured in our products for a while, which we are currently adapting that to our NVRs and I'm sure that will be a differentiator for us as well, mainly because the downside of NVRs is managing them.”

So what are the typical applications for the units? “It's anything from a small retail outlet upwards and that's why w e think we can bring value. If an installer has a small five-camera job or a 30- camera job, they will know they need an NVR but how do they source it? Or what if it's a 2000 camera jobs? In that situation they would need a really big NVR otherwise they would be sitting there with a whole bunch of boxes that they would need to manage individually. And what if you run into a big project and it needs 10,000 cameras or 50,000 cameras? We have a set of products that address each of those environments.”

Is there a challenge that the NVRS can help with? “Analytics aren't really being deploying in scale acr oss the board at the moment so one of the challenges that we feel we can help address is that scaling of the analytics - that's why we brought out this analytics series of appliances. Right now people don't need a large scale

infrastructure for analytics, but they are going to, so dense GPU appliances will be very important. The scale-up nature of systems is still an unknown; even vendors themselves have a lot of uncertainty about what happens when you go from 50 analytics channels to 1000 analytics channel in terms of the infrastructure and performance requirements. So scalability, flexibility and high performance is going to be really important when facing that unknown.”

How does a scalable system aid with the project costs? “If you think that your application is too big for NVRs and y ou think you need to look at shared storage, all of a sudden that represents a big step up in installation costs. If you could use a larger NVR, such as our 4160, that means that you can keep the costs down on the storage side and then take more of the budget and apply it towards cameras and analytics.

“The main benefit of the hyper-converged product is that it is a way to run multiple physical security applications on the same server or appliance. So right now customers might deploy one NVR for their recording, another for their management, another one for their access control system and deploy another one for their analytics etc. This leads to a proliferation of servers per application, but with hyper-converged systems you have the technology to consolidate those onto one server so instead of three to five servers, you've got one server running each application. Again this is a big cost saving that can allow installers to reduce the portion of the budget associated with the infrastructure component.”