When an ice storm hit Ontario, Canada this year, it knocked out power in over hundreds of homes. Cities struck by this crisis included Waterloo, which uses Aimetis Enterprise Manager to manage their video surveillance over centralized cloud management.
When an ice storm hit Ontario, Canada this year, it knocked out power in over hundreds of homes. Cities struck by this crisis included Waterloo, which uses Aimetis Enterprise Manager to manage their video surveillance over centralized cloud management.
“Through AEM's system health monitoring feature the system administrator noticed some locations had lost power while monitoring their video network during the blackout,”
Aimetis said in a blog post.
The above-mentioned case provides an example of how video management system managed to intelligently understand a situation and assist authorities to remedy it. But in several cases, IP video systems themselves can be vulnerable to interruptions caused by network faults, server failures or power outages, and the cost of mitigating these risks are rather high.
However, according to a whitepaper from
March Networks, there is a solution to this. Called Shadow Archiving, this facility introduces a high level of fault tolerance at an economic cost.
“The Shadow Archive is defined as a directory that maps the video of all onboard edge device storage to the central VMS and is accessible via the client software,” the company said in its white paper.
While it is completely possible for a server-centric system to suffer from a disastrous failure, Shadow Archive softens the risks by distributing a portion of the video storage at the edge.
“Moreover, Shadow Archive-enabled devices proactively establish contact with the VMS rather than the other way around,” the white paper pointed out. “As a consequence, the edge device is ‘network aware’, and essentially operates as a VMS in its own right – an important distinction from standard edge devices with embedded storage.”
Because of the inherent, standalone capability of Shadow Archive-enabled devices, the client software is able to access each edge device independently, not only for live-viewing but also for searching and downloading the video data stored on board, according to the paper. Besides this, the video may be streamed to a NAS unit as a secondary storage option.
For situations like an unexpected power outage, Shadow Archiving would be a definite answer. It combines the scalability of central archiving with the fault tolerance of distributed archiving. In March Network’s own words, it is an effective and economical method for reliable video backup in server-centric video surveillance systems.