The following is an excerpt from an article written by Brian Coulombe:
…virtualized platforms are not right for all end-users. Solutions like VMWare require a certain level of IT know-how, certification and expertise in order to implement and maintain. A small to medium-sized end-user would likely find that meeting these requirements is cost-prohibitive and opt for more traditional RAID or redundant recording solutions; however, it still begs the question whether or not there is a middle ground that would more easily allow those mid-level users to reduce hardware dependency.
BCDVideo is one manufacturer who has recently introduced a solution to answer that question. The company’s Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Video Surveillance (HCI-VS), which is based on Scale Computing’s HC3 software, is similar to enterprise-level virtualization platforms in that it enables end-users to run software instances on a pool of hardware resources rather than a single machine.
Environments that are mission critical, or face heavy fines for not being able to access video during their retention time frame are a perfect fit for HCI-VS. If an end-user cannot afford to lose access to their recorded video, then server, networking, and power outages need to be accounted for. If a video archive server were to go down, none of the video on that server is available for review until that server is brought back online. If that server cannot be brought back online, the video is lost forever.
Darren Giacomini, Director of Advanced Systems Architecture