According to market research firm Frost & Sullivan, servers and storage infrastructure make up a substantial amount of video surveillance installation costs. Physical security integrators can take advantage of the right tools and solutions to minimize these substantial costs in order to make bids more competitive and improve reseller margins. Specifically, camera simulator tools reduce guesswork by providing realistic expectations of capacity and bandwidth needs, and clustered NVR storage can reduce storage over-provisioning and eliminate the need for standalone NVR server hardware.

Conventional surveillance infrastructure relies on traditional servers to manage a fixed number of incoming video feeds, and then store these streams on disk storage that is directly attached to each server. The bandwidth and capacity required for each camera are calculated upfront, and fixed storage and server capacity are purchased to match the load. This can become a lengthy process since each camera’s resolution, frame rate, compression and motion detection settings must be individually calculated. This fixed architecture is replicated as many times as the camera load requires, which can lead to chronic “over-provisioning” of storage that may never be used.

Actual mileage may vary

With any video-based surveillance system design, bandwidth estimation and network load are important considerations. Compression rates for MPEG4 and H.264 can vary based on actual motion observed in the field. H.264 represents a substantial bandwidth reduction over MPEG-4 compression (often up to 40 percent). Similarly, motion detection schemes may deliver quite different bit rates and capacity needs depending on the installation particulars. A less technical but common reason for variances in planned infrastructure is simply that camera changes are made during field installs to meet user recording specifications. Swapping in higher-resolution cameras to make a customer happy or beefing up frame rates to meet real-world needs can play havoc with carefully calculated server and storage requirements.

Using a camera bandwidth estimator, such as the Axis system design DVD, and calculating for different frame rates are appropriate efforts for design estimation.

Clustered storage reduces risk of being wrong