This white paper describes testing that Dell Technologies performed to validate that a solution is available today to address the business challenges described in the last section. We selected applications for video management and AI computer vision from three leading ISVs in this industry. The partners that we selected have also invested in product development to ensure a seamless experience for their joint customers. We also chose a platform for testing that was designed to support a wide range of applications including those requiring GPU acceleration.

Microsoft and Dell have partnered to create a multipurpose platform using world-class technology that allows organizations to manage and analyze video and other sensor data using a single integrated platform. The system architecture that we implemented is the Dell Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI with Storage Spaces Direct, plus NVIDIA A16 server-class GPUs. The Azure Stack HCI system leverages Microsoft Windows virtual machine virtualization that will be familiar to many IT and OT (operational technology) professionals.

We chose to implement the following three applications:

1. BriefCam software, an industry-leading provider of video analytics for rapid video review and search, real-time alerting, and quantitative video insights.
2. Ipsotek specializes in AI-enhanced video analytics software to manage automatically generated alerts in real-time for crowd management, smoke detection, intrusion detection, perimeter protection, number plate recognition, and traffic management.
3. The Milestone Systems XProtect platform video management software enables organizations and institutions to create the perfect combination of cameras, sensors, and analytics.

We performed real-time analytics with both BriefCam and Ipsotek through integration with the Milestone directory server and video recording services. All three applications were hosted on a 5-node Microsoft Azure Stack HCI cluster. Each of the components is described in more detail below.