Not a Sure Bet
A well-designed networked system requires planning and best-of-breed products
- By Jason Schmitt
- Jun 01, 2008
Digital video has become the
buzzword for all modern surveillance
systems, but networked,
or IP, video is still anything but a
sure bet—despite its numerous benefits.
With the performance and flexibility of
IP video surveillance systems comes
tremendous technical complexity and a
staggering array of products for security
system designers, integrators and operators
when compared with the mature and
relatively simple analog CCTV systems
of the past.
Anyone approaching the IP video surveillance
market from a position of product
selection and acquisition would do
well to take a step back, understand the
true requirements of a well-designed IP
networked security system and choose
best-of-breed components accordingly,
rather than latching on to one-stop-shop,
end-to-end IP surveillance vendors.
While digital video technologies have
opened up new features and intelligent
analysis capabilities not possible with
analog video, many suffer from performance
and scalability problems because of
poor system architecture. For organizations
to realize the full benefits of IP
video surveillance, they must design and
build a system that is capable of performing
to current and future requirements.
Building to Fit
Many integrators have the experience to
design sufficient network and storage
infrastructure using relatively inexpensive
commodity components. Then they
install video devices and applications that
quickly overwhelm the network because
they do not intelligently manage those
resources. These systems may perform
acceptably at low camera counts, but performance
drops as the system scales to
higher camera counts.
A video surveillance system designed
to actively manage network resources can
guarantee video availability when it’s needed
without stealing precious bandwidth
from other mission-critical applications. A
system that is network-aware and built to
manage video infrastructure can isolate
high-bandwidth video archiving from other
segments of the network and only serve up
video necessary to client applications.
A video surveillance system that takes a
network appliance approach and manages
video streams as part of this infrastructure
also can balance its use of storage
resources across multiple storage arrays to
ensure data integrity and availability.
Next to scalability, the most underestimated
and misunderstood aspect of an IP
video surveillance system is its maintainability.
Installers and integrators are
experienced when it comes to analog system
design and rollout, and surveillance
operators are normally well-versed and
experienced at keeping a system running
or taking on light expansion. With IP
video surveillance systems, the design
and installation entails specialized networking
and IT skills that only progressive
integrators possess.
The majority of surveillance operators
have little experience in maintaining or
configuring an IP surveillance system
after the network-savvy integrators have
completed the install and left. After setup
is complete, the operators do not have a
great understanding of how to manage or
expand a networked system, so they rely
on integrator support services or internal
IT departments. An IP video surveillance
system must be designed for ease of configuration
and adaptability so future
needs may be met without reliance on
expensive services.
A reliable IP system also must be
designed for lights-off operation that
does not require constant monitoring,
patching, upgrading and equipmentswapping
to keep it running. An IP video
surveillance system essentially needs a
video infrastructure that is reliable, scalable
and future-proof.
Open Integration
Another important design consideration
in an IP video surveillance system is the
openness of individual components of the
system. Most video surveillance vendors
claim that their products are standardsbased
and open to easy integration with
components from other vendors, but the
reality is that standards in video surveillance
are loosely interpreted and integration
capabilities are often oversold. For a
true best-of-breed system that meets the
needs of unique and complex video surveillance
applications, each of the components
must be designed for open interaction
with other components from other
manufacturers.
Vendors that assemble complete endto-
end solutions normally take shortcuts
in implementing interfaces between each
building block of their solution, so you
lose features, performance and reliability
when you introduce a component from a
specialist manufacturer.
It is possible to implement an IP video
surveillance infrastructure that performs,
scales to high numbers of cameras and is
open to integration with best-of-breed
components. However, a video surveillance
infrastructure can only capture
video, store it for safekeeping and send it
to where it needs to go. As a system
grows to numerous cameras, geographically
distributed and with data integrations
in place with nonvideo security systems
like access control or identity management,
a new class of applications distinct
from the video infrastructure is
needed to manage and make sense of all
this converged data.
These applications—known as physical
security information management—
are based on the security information
management systems in use in IT security
environments to provide centralized
visibility and control of the IT security
posture of an organization. PSIM applications,
which are ambitious in vision
but relatively immature in implementation,
are promising to present security
video correlated with all types of physical
security data and assets to give organizations
a truly converged security management
capability.
PSIM applications are likely to
change the way security teams look at
video—literally and figuratively—but
they are only as good as the video that is
captured, transported and stored by the
video infrastructure.