At Dell, we are seeing an increasing trend towards more vertical-focused file storage requirements. In particular, there is rapid growth in storage requirements for video surveillance. Today we’re announcing a new solution to support this customer demand. Video surveillance is becoming ubiquitous, and can now be found in large office buildings and warehouses, transportation hubs such as airports and train stations, sports stadiums, college campuses and schools.
Video surveillance is evolving into a more digital-based solution, whereas it was previously dependent on analog systems that required extensive amounts of coaxial cabling. This analog approach has proven quite challenging if you need to scale the amount of cameras, or replace cameras with higher quality ones. More substantially, the greatest challenge has been the ability to store, access and search all of the recorded video. Due to the rise of IP-based cameras that use standard networking, the entire solution can be modernized including the ability to use video management software and back-end storage. This allows the solution to be much more flexible and grow over time.
Based on this, it makes sense that you would need a storage solution that can scale along with your video surveillance needs. The Dell Fluid File Video Solution, which we’re introducing today, can start as small as 56TB and scale all the way up to 1PB raw. This makes a dramatic difference for environments requiring long retention periods of video files.
The new solution combines the Dell Storage FS8600 scale-out NAS appliance with Dell Storage SCv2080 dense SAN array, and has the ability to scale out NAS controllers for performance, which means it can support more cameras or those requiring a higher streaming rate for increased quality such as high-definition. Storage and performance scaling can be done independently ensuring the Dell solution is tailored to actual requirements and avoids overspending.
It’s important to keep costs down as budgets can be limited for upgrading or deploying a brand new video surveillance solution—especially if it is required by policy, and no budget has been planned in advance. That is why our Fluid File Video Solution is cost optimized from a dollar-per-gigabyte ($/GB) perspective. The Dell Fluid File Video Solution provides the best storage density compared to the top 5 storage vendors, storing 1PB of raw capacity in 14U of rack space (including two 1U switches)[1]. And, by providing 1PB of raw capacity for as low as $0.18/GB[2], it can definitely help keep power and cooling costs down, improving the overall solution TCO.
In moving to a more IT-centric solution for video surveillance, it’s important to keep storage management simple. Traditional Enterprise NAS solutions have been perceived as too complex or requiring specialist storage administrators to maintain. With the Fluid File Video Solution, all storage is managed from a single user experience in Dell Enterprise Manager, and due to all the storage being virtual, there is no complex LUN management required or understanding on how to deal with disk aggregates needed.
Video Management Software (VMS) plays a key part in a video surveillance solution, and is important that it is tested and certified on back-end storage platforms. Currently Milestone has been certified on many Dell Storage products including Dell Fluid File Video Solution. Certification for Genetec will be coming soon with more VMS providers planned over the next few months.
The Fluid File Video Solution is available starting today in the Americas and Asia and is coming soon to Europe. For more information, talk with your Dell representative about your video surveillance initiatives to see how the Fluid File Video Solution can accommodate your back-end storage requirements. Your representative can also help collaborate with our vast network of channel partners for video surveillance related projects.
