We have concluded that the addition of extended storage provided by Surveillance Bridge has a negligible overall performance impact on the overall CV and VMS solution while simultaneously offering greater functionality and reducing the cost of storage.
Main Benefits:
- Significantly faster time for DR
- Recovery of operations
- Recovery of ability to view locally held video
- Reduced cost of storage
- Ability to tailor local Tier 1 and remote extended volume to meet user requirements
Accurately quantifying the costs of IT infrastructure is not a trivial task and even more so when it comes to analysis of storage.
A myriad of factors need to be considered, such as tangible and intangible benefits, data center energy and space savings, storage optimization and the impact of downtimes and outages, come into play when assessing the ROI for storage spend.
Storage Tiering is a method of associating different categories of data to different type of storage media technologies. Storage media is not a single homogeneous resource and is typically differentiated in terms of performance, availability, and costs.
Organizations and businesses access their storage needs based on these Tiers, generally assigning the most important data requirements to most performant storage tier.
Adding a non-premises remote volume with Surveillance Bridge
We choose the Dell PowerScale scale-out NAS solution for the LiveDB volume extension. PowerScale is a versatile highly scalable and easy to manage storage solution for large-scale VMS and CV environments. Many of our solutions use PowerScale for Milestone Tier 2 storage when Surveillance Bridge is not integrated into the design.
Our Tier 1 local storage was VMware vSAN that is used for all our VM and applications that require highly performant local storage. We found the installation, configuration, and integration of Surveillance Bridge with vSAN and PowerScale to be intuitive and consistent with the Surveillance Bridge supported options for combining local and extension volumes into a single read/write target for Milestone XProtect.
Scale and Performance
We documented our decision process for sizing the ratio of local to extension volume space in the Sizing and Scaling and Use Cases Validation sections. We used a combination of 4 TB of vSAN storage with 20 TB of PowerScale storage to achieve a good trade-off between total storage cost and total retention time available on the system.
There were no noticeable performance impacts on the baseline operation of Milestone recorders while integrated with Surveillance Bridge . Elevated performance metrics (CPU, Memory, Network) during DR data restores was expected and is documented previously within the relevant use case section.
The main factors that must be taken into account when selecting a suitable Local storage vs Extended storage capacity ratio are:
- Choose your retention period
- Identify your total camera count
- Identify your average camera bit rate in Mb/s
Disaster Recovery
Even though the Milestone recording LiveDB is not stored in a traditional RDBMS configuration, it is still informative to think about the Recovery Time Objective (RTO)—Resumption of recording operations—and the Recovery Point Objective (RPO)— Recordings available for specific time period—for comparing options to recover from a system or component failure when recording video with Milestone XProtect. In this validation, we compared the expected RTO and RPO for a disaster recovery using Milestone native 2-tier storage compared to Milestone XProtect with Surveillance Bridge .
We confirmed that Surveillance Bridge achieves near immediate recovery if there is a disaster. Using a meta data restore of the local file system offered almost immediate availability of all camera recordings as required by XProtect.
Milestone endorses this solution, and XProtect customers can deploy Surveillance Bridge to create a seamless data management solution that is compatible with native live recording drives. We observed that Surveillance Bridge automatically relocated less accessed camera recordings from local vSAN storage to the PowerScale NAS for cost-effective extended retention times. We also validated that the camera recordings stored using Surveillance Bridge were accessible in real time. Scrolling through the VMS timeline allows Surveillance Bridge to smoothly play back the recordings.