StarWind HCI Appliance: Scalable and Reliable Video Surveillance & Analytics Platform

Introduction

Organizations worldwide require reliable intelligent security systems to protect people, assets, and goods 24/7/365. Typical solutions consist of a combination of 3-4 servers, expensive dedicated storage, and networking. Although these solutions are time-proven, their size and cost simply don’t work when you need them at the edge: in every customer’s location. This becomes even more complex when some locations are overseas.

With this in mind, a solution for ROBO & Edge needs to address the challenges they encounter when serving hundreds of locations worldwide: size, time to deliver it, resources to deliver it to all the locations, qualified technicians to do the installation, and a reliable support contract with solid SLAs covering all components.

Challenge

Building a tested and certified solution requires a lot of time and resources when working with multiple hardware and software vendors, especially when there is a need for customization for every site. It’s also hard to achieve peace of mind while working with a multitude of components from different vendors to build, qualify, and support them as an integral solution.

Moreover, such complex solutions require trained engineers on site to install, setup, and migrate the existing workloads to the new system. Correspondingly, large architectures on numerous sites require additional shipping, implementation, and maintenance costs.

Traditional solutions rely on a single SAN or NAS which translates into the entire solution becoming an inverted pyramid of doom – if SAN fails, everything else will crash as well. This can be avoided by using redundant storage systems, but such an approach will drive up the cost by an order of magnitude.

Within such a system, server, storage, OS, VMS, software, and camera vendors all have to work together to help you if there is a problem. However, matching SLAs across the board and avoiding finger-pointing if something doesn’t work right is one of the toughest challenges when it comes to deployments in questions.

Solution

StarWind HCA for Video Surveillance and Analytics is a hyperconverged platform that combines unified management for hypervisor, networking, and backup with highly available compute and fault-tolerant storage. All built with industry standard servers and no proprietary equipment.

StarWind guarantees faster time-to-solution by delivering a custom or a pre-built system for the required number of cameras, recording retention time, and analytics requirements. We bring a complete platform from a single vendor, qualified and certified by industry-leading VMS vendors, and covered by a single support umbrella. So you just need to add VMS, analytics, and additional software of your choice to provide your customer a solution, fully tailored to their project needs.

With StarWind HCA, you don’t only get a purpose-built solution but also the expertise of our engineers who can make your customer’s transition to the new system a seamless experience by helping to migrate existing workloads to be governed by StarWind. Additionally, StarWind HCA is configured-to-order, including all software setup, to make it drop-shippable right to your customers’ locations. To that end, a fault-tolerant StarWind HCA cluster has a minimalistic hardware footprint, which makes it easy to ship anywhere in the world, be it an overseas office, oil rig, or a remote research laboratory.

HCA provides the foundation for a highly available VMS cluster with a fault-tolerant storage architecture on just 2 servers (no other equipment required). Thanks to our synchronous active-active storage replication, StarWind ensures the availability of your recordings and video applications even if you lose a server and a drive at the same time.

And finally, we provide single support for all the platform components under one hood and add ProActive Premium Support to identify and solve issues before they can affect performance or uptime. As a result, the same SLA level is ensured for hardware, hypervisor, and the SDS stack.

Conclusion

Faster time-to-solution, qualified help on all steps from prototyping and worldwide shipping to implementation, combined with high uptime and single support umbrella for all the platform components turns StarWind HCA for Video Surveillance and Analytics into a platform for mission-critical tasks that you and your customers can rely on.