The city of Fishers is one of the fastest growing cities in Indiana, and with a population of nearly 100,000, the city was struggling with rapidly increasing storage needs for its video surveillance system.
The city of Fishers is one of the fastest growing cities in Indiana, and with a population of nearly 100,000, the city was struggling with rapidly increasing storage needs for its video surveillance system. With plans to have over 250 cameras installed around the city by the end of 2024, the city needed a scalable solution that would not only save on in-house hardware and related maintenance costs but also simplify system use and align with the city’s Cloud First initiative. The city was faced with the following:
- Rapidly growing video surveillance data storage needs to accommodate a large number of new cameras as well as evolving, long-term data storage requirements.
- Expensive on-premises storage and related maintenance costs.
- Limited on-premises storage capacity for video data (80 terabytes).
- Need for fast access to video data when required.
- Need for longer-term, automated data archival plans.
Solution
To solve these challenges, Fishers officials are working with Tiger Surveillance to integrate the city’s existing open platform, XProtect video management software from Milestone Systems, with AWS cloud services. This has enabled the city to efficiently store large amounts of video data in the cloud while leveraging the cost savings for all the city’s AWS cloud services. The deployment currently consists of four recording servers, with a fifth server set to be deployed soon. This on-premises hybrid cloud solution:
- Uses the Tiger Surveillance Bridge software plugin within the Milestone VMS for seamless AWS integration.
- The city is now able to keep ten days of recorded video on-site, then move data to AWS for archiving with a tiered data storage plan enabling real-time video access and glacier archival storage in AWS.
Results
The city has successfully transitioned to using its Milestone VMS for seamless on-premises video retention extended to AWS S3 data storage. A percentage of the video is real-time readable and accessible in AWS. After a defined amount of time, the data is tiered out to affordable Glacier archival storage in AWS for an additional 180 days. With the deployment, city officials have benefited from the following:
- Increased video system scalability for the planned, growing number of city cameras.
- Substantial cost savings compared to in-house storage costs, including reduced hardware acquisition and maintenance expenses. The city’s AWS costs now total less than 10% of what that annualized cost for on-premises storage units would be.
- Multi-regional, long-term data protection in AWS without additional effort.
- An easy-to-use, fast-to-scale, reliable, very cost-effective VMS solution.
Overall, the city of Fishers’ partnership with Milestone Systems, Tiger Surveillance, and AWS has provided a scalable, cost-effective solution to their video surveillance storage needs, allowing them to focus on maintaining the safety and security of their community.
Product Adopted:Software