We found that the VxRail with VMware provided a reliable and scalable solution for hosting VMS and CV applications from different vendors on a common converged platform.
Dell Technologies, together with three market-leading VMS and CV vendors, have designed an integrated solution running on a common platform that is easy to install, easy to operate, and easy to grow.
The results of our HA testing show that virtualized instances of Milestone Systems XProtect for video management together with CV applications from both BriefCam and Ipsotek provide native high availability (HA) features and scale-out performance that are critical in an enterprise-class solution. The VxRail HCI system with VMware virtualization plus NVIDIA A40 server-class GPUs with vGPU provides additional features for managing high availability and scale-out needs that can complement the CV and VMS application's native features.
All of these products were installed on a single VxRail 5-node cluster for full system integration testing. Storage for the video management archive was provided by Dell PowerScale scale-out NAS storage. All video streams used for testing were provided by camera simulation software reading from prerecorded local video files in a continuous loop. We tested a maximum of 840 simulated camera streams being archived to the VMS together with each CV application performing real-time analytics on 320 camera streams. We also found that a single Ipsotek VM with one NVIDIA A40 GPU could process real-time analytics from 30 camera streams reliably. We also found that a single BriefCam VM with one NVIDIA A40 GPU could process real-time analytics from 50 camera streams reliably.
Finally, we identified an approach to help to size a platform of any size. The solution scales horizontally as more cameras are added to the system. We also defined rules around the placement of all VMs in the platform to ensure high availability is retained at all times.