The Rise Of IT Efficiencies In Security Environments

By Brandon Reich, Senior Director of Surveillance Solutions, Pivot3 Inc.

Never before have modern organizations been hungrier for data. Business leaders in a wide variety of market segments seek out information gleaned from network devices and systems to achieve more informed decision-making and make sense of what is occurring at any given time.

Video surveillance is a critical addition to data analysis and situational awareness. It enables stakeholders to visualize potential anomalies, events, and trends. For example, in a city environment, first responders can leverage video to assess a situation in real time and execute a more informed and quicker response to a situation. Casino surveillance operators can leverage cameras to monitor for compliance with industry and government regulations. Oil and gas facilities are able to monitor system operations in remote sites to prevent system failures. Marketing teams also find video useful to determine the success of promotional campaigns within retail stores.

All of these scenarios point to the growing benefit of video surveillance as a security and business optimization tool. But as the value of video increases, users need to ensure this investment is protected. System failures — where live or recorded video becomes inaccessible and data lost — leave organizations exposed to increased risks, vulnerabilities, and operational interruptions. Quite simply, downtime and data loss is not an option for any business, whether it operates one site locally or many diverse facilities across the globe.

IT integrators who work with surveillance leaders have probably seen one or two archaic NVR/DVR platforms used to store and manage video data. These solutions are no longer viable in today’s tech-driven world and are quickly becoming extinct. IT-centric technologies are more reliable, efficient, and easy to manage than the products surveillance users have typically relied on.

Modern server and storage infrastructure delivers advanced levels of performance and efficiency but in a simpler and more cost-effective form factor than traditional storage systems. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is a somewhat new approach that delivers enterprise-class IT server and SAN storage solutions that are built for surveillance workloads, large and small, and in many cases at a price point competitive with DAS and NVRs.

But HCI platforms far exceed what these “solutions-of-old” could dream of delivering. Hyperconverged architecture streamlines system performance, improving the capacity for video and data capture. Designed for write-intensive environments, such as video surveillance and enterprise IT applications, hyperconvergence provides robust levels of performance, resiliency, and scalability, enabling organizations to protect and ensure the availability of video surveillance data.

Here are the top three ways in which HCI delivers positive benefits to your surveillance-customers.

1. Manageability: IT departments have shifted away from DAS, and transitioned to virtualized servers with shared SAN storage and centralized management to reduce server hardware, management complexity, and overall costs. By consolidating servers, storage, and client workstations onto a single enterprise-class platform, infrastructure can be administered and managed quickly and efficiently from one location by a single person.
2. Scalability: As business and security plans evolve and budgets change, systems must scale compute, storage, and bandwidth resources simultaneously to adapt to ever-changing requirements. With hyperconvergence, you can buy what you need now and grow storage and compute linearly without disrupting system operations as the need arises.
3. Failover Protection: With HCI, virtual servers restart with no user intervention during failures, and all previously recorded video remains accessible even during failures. Scalar erasure coding protects data better than RAID technology and can withstand the simultaneous failure of five disks or an entire appliance plus two additional drives, ensuring that data remains protected and accessible at all times.

The Future of Hyper Convergence
Gartner reports organizations are now entering the next era of datacenter infrastructure — hyper convergence. Users will layer applications and ensure mission-critical operations exceed performance expectations during critical times. Bergen County Sheriff’s Office is an organization that already accomplishes this through an HCI deployment that manages video from thousands of cameras while also streamlining IT infrastructure — allowing the agency to be more efficient throughout its IT and security efforts.

Integrators need to be savvy on what they can meet their customer’s IT and surveillance goals, from both a technology and services perspective. Being knowledgeable about new innovations can help you sell infrastructure, keeping that piece of business rather than losing server sales to a customer’s internal IT department.

Integrators are tasked with ensuring surveillance customers can benefit from the best practices and solutions proven in the world of IT. The interest in new technologies is growing at a rapid rate. Now is the time to transform your customer’s surveillance environments while exceeding your IT customers’ performance expectations.