Frame drop is one of the key problems in IP surveillance systems. The consequence of dropped frames are recording gaps which translate into lost images that could cost a company unmeasurable financial damages.
Frame drop is one of the key problems in IP surveillance systems. The consequence of dropped frames are recording gaps which translate into lost images that could cost a company unmeasurable financial damages.
Rasilient Systems is a Silicon Valley-based manufacturer of purpose-built surveillance recording servers and storage systems. “We are an open platform focusing on mission critical projects where loss of video is not an option,” explained Bing Wan, Director of Middle East Operations at Rasilient Systems. “We offer high availability, high scalability enterprise level IP surveillance storage solutions. A typical project has hundreds to thousands of cameras and high storage requirements.”
Bing Wan,
Director of Middle East Operations
Rasilient Systems
Some examples of projects that the company has carried out includes Abu Dhabi’s Central market which entailed 2,200 cameras and 3.2 petabytes of storage, and the Imam Hussein Shrine in Iraq which has 1,230 cameras and four petabytes worth of footage monitoring and recording the movement of 30 million visitors annually.
Rasilient sought to design a recording server combined with a storage system that could support up to 1,000 cameras and over one petabyte of storage. “We wanted the NFD Systems to be the basic building block of large projects, for example we recently had a project in Qatar with over 2,600 cameras and eight petabytes of storage which used several of these systems,” explained Wan.
Rasilient’s solution was designed with video surveillance in mind. “Other storage companies are IT-based, and the storage technology employed by other vendors caters to random access, i.e., including read and write. Whereas our system is built for over 95 percent write and minimum read access,” remarked Wan.
Write performance is impacted when there are large amounts of read, and ultimately this leads to video loss. “One of our goals is to reduce video loss and ultimately achieve no frame drop. This is important to mission critical projects. Many companies can’t afford to have video loss because it can have grave consequences or very expensive consequences,” said Wan.
One of the initial problems Rasilient faced was the lack of dedicated surveillance drives in the market. “When we first started years ago, only desktop drives were available and even with our patented technology, which allows drives to heal themselves, we still had issues with disk failure. When surveillance drives came out, we were very happy that the industry was listening to our needs and realized the importance of dedicated drives for 24/7 recording, something a desktop drive just was not designed to do,” he said.
Rasilient chose the
Seagate Technology's SkyHawk drive to be implemented in their systems. “The biggest reason we chose Seagate was the reliability and support we were getting during the qualification process,” explained Wan. “It allowed us to lower the total cost of ownership and achieve great performance in large scale deployments. After switching to Seagate we have lower disk failure rates and we also achieved a remarkable NFD (no frame drop) during our solution partner certification with
Milestone System’s XProtect VMS,” Wan added.
Under the Milestone certification criteria, a frame drop rate of under 0.1 percent is acceptable. Rasilient’s achievement was even more remarkable: “We had 1,000 2-MP simulated cameras streaming for 72 hours at 25 FPS at HD quality,” said Wan. “To make the test even harder and stress test the system even more, we increased the recording bandwidth to 2.1 GB/s. In the meantime, we simulated a disk failure by pulling out a drive out of a live system, and again no frame was dropped. SkyHawk is definitely a contributing factor to this success,” he concluded.