The growing number of higher specification surveillance cameras and the huge amount of data they generate, combined with longer data retention periods and real-time response requirements, are pushing the boundaries of what traditional storage approaches can handle.
The IVX is a revolutionary technology startup founded by industry veterans from Cisco, Juniper and Motorola. The company is dedicated to providing innovative, high performance, fully integrated solutions for the public safety sector that effectively manage collaboration among multiple agencies and improve crisis management response time. The IVX enables real-time surveillance data collection, synchronization and collaboration across the private and public safety sectors.
The challenge
In the wake of recent mass shootings and terror attacks on high profile cities, public safety is once again at the top of the agenda. The growing number of higher specification surveillance cameras and the huge amount of data they generate, combined with longer data retention periods and real-time response requirements, are pushing the boundaries of what traditional storage approaches can handle. With these market conditions building, the IVX set off to look for an alternative solution for video surveillance.
From proprietary to open source to private and public cloud solutions, The IVX tried different approaches, but they all failed to deliver the necessary performance and cost efficiency. Both NetApp and EMC solutions required expensive software licenses and would incur hardware and maintenance costs, while open source software lacked reliability, software manageability and support. Additionally, encryption and data security concerns are still inhibiting the widespread use of the public cloud for surveillance solutions.
The Promise solution at the IVX
After testing and conducting proof of concept, The IVX concluded that Promise Technology’s purpose-built hyperconverged infrastructure — VSkyCube — was the only solution to meet all of their current needs while providing a path to the future.
VSkyCube pre-integrates computing, storage, and networking into hyperconverged nodes, giving a pre-integrated and adaptable cluster with a unified pool of resources that can be deployed, adapted, scaled, and managed quickly and easily. It is specifically optimized for video surveillance workloads and brings the benefits of the hyper-scale datacenter to the market. By using the VSkyCube software-defined approach, The IVX can deploy and launch surveillance services with just a few clicks. They also have the ability to manage, monitor, scale and adjust compute, storage and networking resources all in the same web interface with the centralized management software, VSkyView.
As the number of cameras and the amount of video they capture continue to increase, The IVX can dynamically scale out to multiple PB for 24x7x365 intensive workloads without interruption, thanks to Promise’s software-defined cloud storage – VSkyStor. And, most importantly, all sensitive data is protected by RAID and RAIN. High resilience and high availability features prevent drive and server failure, making for uninterrupted video capture and access.
Results and business benefits
With 24/7 support from Promise Technology, The IVX has successfully delivered surveillance services through a virtual private cloud on top of VSkyCube. The IVX can now handle 250 TB of HD surveillance video data, and is enjoying a 30-40% reduction in budget that was previously going to things such as hardware and software licensing and operating costs.
VSkyCube is the only enterprise-class surveillance infrastructure that delivers the highest levels of performance, resiliency and data protection, all without the cost, complexity and skills typically required by virtualized environments.