Thanks for the compliment.

“Also, the storage on most SD cards in cameras cannot be accessed like you would a DVR (Mobotix is the only exception I know of, besides our own cameras with built-in storage).”

The interesting thing is that even some Asian corporations provide such compatibility. Example? Dahua Technology and their IPC-F725P. You can use a 32GB card with it, You can view recorded video without removing the card. Obviously this trend is getting more popular.

Regards,

Marian Maroszek

Thanks for your comments.

Yes, if an IT department already has incurred the expense of building the space for the servers, some of that overhead cost is covered, and some IT managers will ignore that portion of the costs. However, it surprising how much the electricity costs and replacement costs of hard drives add up to. Those are still additional costs that should be considered.

As for the VMS issue, we already have a camera with built-in storage. Our current models use a 2.5 inch hard drive, the type you find in rugged laptops. Until SD cards are cost effective, this provides the best solution for storage in the camera.

We supply our own VMS with our camera, which works great for small systems. It provides all the search and playback options you mentioned, plus a number of other improved methods of searching.

The good news is that we will be announcing integration with the largest VMS companies in the next few months. They will be able to fully access the video stored in our cameras, just the same as if each camera was a single channel DVR.

Search is a few seconds slower than if you were using an NVR, but not much slower, since we have a full relational database in the camera, along with tons of added metadata that we get from our video analytics.

So, you can more quickly find events and have far more search capabilities than a traditional NVR or DVR.

In most ways, the storage in the camera is invisible to the user when searching or playing back video. Networks are fast enough that you generally don’t see any difference.

At first, we expect the VMS integration to be able to access the stored video and play it back like a traditional NVR. We send them links to the alarm event video clips, so they can access them quickly without searching. However, some of the metadata search capabilities that we offer with our VMS will probably be added to the integrated VMS systems later. You can still use our client for that, when needed.

So, we are almost there. As you said, this is an important issue. We see it as a big milestone (name dropping intended). We’ll be making announcements about this soon, and will be demonstrating it at this upcoming ASIS conference in September. Stop by and we’ll show it to you working.

Thanks.

But if I’ve to pick up one nit in your theory, the VMS need to manage all the cameras & for search and play back kind of feature that’s common across all VMS’s, the user need to login to each individual ip cameras to search for an event/alarm since the storage is still at the edge. Unless the VMS also knows (meta data) of what’s being stored in each of the IP cameras, it’s indeed a slow search.

Thanks for your input on the server storage costs. You are closer to this than I am. What surprises me is the wide range in prices that I hear. I’ve seen some prices down as low as $500 as you point out, but I’ve not seen many integrators using those. More in the $1,000 range per TB, especially in large systems (1 TB and 2 TB systems are more per TB than 8 TB systems). But as you also mention, there are plenty of systems going in at much higher prices per TB.

I’m sure you are right that in the next year or two this is going to flatten out.

I’m no expert on what the average is, so I’ll take your word that $2,000 to the end user might be high. But once you add the total cost of ownership, the SD card still looks quite competitive in 5 years.

What I’ve heard from specialists in SSDs moving into data center servers is that SSDs are more expensive today (of course they are more expensive per TB than SD cards as well), but they expect that to change in the next 3-5 years. My guess is that’s about where the shift in SD card storage should also start looking more compelling.

Thanks for the input on storage server pricing.

Good points. Thanks for examining many other important items on the topic.

One aspect I would question: “The typical end user price I’m hearing today is around $2,000.”

I think that number’s somewhat dated. For video surveillance deployments, I think 1/2 to 1/4 of that amount ($500 to $1000) is becoming quite common.

Even high end storage like Intransa or Pivot3 is significantly less than $2,000 per TB. Many of the NVRs being released today are providing servers with 4TB of storage for less than $3,000.

Then there’s the use of NAS arrays which bring the cost of storage way under $500 per TB (however these are only in limited use currently for video surveillance applications).

There are certainly ways to spend more than $2,0000 per TB (most of the incumbent DVR companies charge outrageous storage prices). However, either those companies will bring their prices down or have their market share taken away by the newer generation of products.