Network storage becoming more common in surveillance: D-Link

Storage in a video surveillance system allows the consolidation of recordings from multiple locations. Previous surveillance equipment required footage to be stored either in board or on a storage media directly linked to the device. Yet today, storage is increasingly moved to off-site locations accessible via the Internet. This is to prevent data loss in the event of natural or human-caused disasters.

There are two primary network storage technologies, namely network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN). “NAS is ideal for small to mid-sized operations which don’t require real-time computing and calculation for storage. Basic NAS solutions can be utilized by home users as a way to consolidate storage across a home network,” said Quenton Miao, Head of Global Marketing at D-Link.

“SAN is especially applicable to datacenters and cloud-optimized computing, which provide dynamic end-to-end solutions. This type of storage is commonly used by enterprise-level surveillance systems, the telecommunications industry, banks, data centers, and so on,” he said.

When choosing the right NAS, several things need to be considered, one of them being bandwidth management. “Users need to ensure that their NAS solution offers sufficient bandwidth to simultaneously store all incoming data from devices on their surveillance network. Bandwidth required will obviously be a function of the number of devices on the network and the bitrate being used to store data,” Miao said.

The compression format and RAID level are other things that need to be taken into consideration, he said.