Milestone Intelligent Video Surveillance

Video surveillance systems are rapidly evolving into smart visual intelligence platforms with capabilities going far beyond traditional monitoring and recording systems. These systems employ digital cameras and AI/ML-based image analysis tools to trigger actions based on events, patterns and predictive analytics. The result is tighter security, greater staff productivity, and lower cost.

Data storage plays a new and vital role in these systems. With numerous cameras collecting high-res video in 1080 or 4K formats, these technologies generate massive data sets. Depending on the industry and regulations, the retention time for this data could vary from months to years, or perhaps even indefinitely. The data also needs to be readily available to facilitate analysis with machine learning/deep learning algorithms, either in real time or after the fact. Finally, the storage infrastructure needs to facilitate searching, so users can quickly retrieve specific clips for review. Of course, all of this must be achieved within the constraints of tight operating budgets.

Cloudian HyperFile and HyperStore, together with Milestone XProtect, provides an intelligent and powerful solution capable of recording and monitoring up to thousands of cameras simultaneously.

Cloudian® storage platform integrates seamlessly with Milestone’s Xprotect® to provide an exabyte-scalable platform that can span multiple physical sites within a central storage environment.

Traditional video surveillance workflows consist of separate storage solutions for live vs archived feeds. Video blocks are initially written to the live database and later moved to the archive database based on a schedule and/or policies defined in the VMS. This process of tiering and data movement causes overhead on the application and can add more complexity to the data pipeline.

While the certified solution of Cloudian with Xprotect supports the traditional workflow, it also introduces a simplified and consolidated solution for live database and archive storage. Here, Cloudian HyperFile® NFS share is configured as the live database with tiering enabled on the same share for seamless archiving to HyperStore®. This consolidated storage environment frees up the VMS from the processor-intensive tiering and data movement, significantly simplifying the workflow.

The solution comes with the highest storage density in the industry, optimizing storage costs by up to 70% over traditional NAS and up to 30% as compared with tape allowing security managers to meet growing retention requirements within existing budget and space constraints. The platform also provides integrated data protection and cloud integration, giving multiple options to protect and share video feeds. Cloudian’s embedded metadata tags allow the Milestone XProtect system to label the data and quickly search for specific patterns via integrated tools such as Elastic Search.

Customers can also create custom solutions, incorporating new analytics capabilities through Milestone’s open architecture, to solve their unique business challenges. As data storage requirements change over time, customers can easily adjust their policy settings to meet changing infrastructure needs.

Summary

Video surveillance systems are experiencing massive growth with applications across multiple industries. With the increase in camera density and the scale of deployments, immense volumes of video and audio media assets are being created that need to be stored and protected. The certified solution of Cloudian storage with Milestone XProtect offers an ideal platform to accommodate this unprecedented growth. The solution offers simple, seamless data management through a single pane of glass across on-premises and public-cloud storage to further optimize investment costs.

Key Benefits of the Joint Solution

• Increase efficiency and productivity by leveraging Milestone’s powerful open platform IP VMS designed for large-scale and high-security deployments
• Consolidate disparate storage silos to a single petabyte-scalable storage platform to meet retention time requirements, reduce technical complexity and performance bottlenecks
• Increase intelligence by capturing important attributes with rich metadata tagging; record information such as scene content, audio transcripts, or facial recognition
• Meet data availability SLAs with data protection choices including erasure coding and replication across multiple devices and sites
• Support future growth needs with multiple deployment and configuration options, including tiering to AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure
• Reduce costs by 70%, compared with traditional storage systems