Green Surveillance

By Aimetis

Video surveillance energy consumption is largely attributed to the electrical power required to operate the servers that are running the cameras and storing vast amounts of recorded video data. However, electrical power usage is not a typical design criterion for CCTV, nor is it properly managed as an expense. This is likely because the billed electrical costs are not clearly linked to CCTV, and the electrical bill is not within the responsibility or the budget of the security group.

With CCTV deployments, typical camera density ranges from 4 to 32 channels per DVR, and come in increments of 4 or 8 channels. Consequently, numerous physical servers are necessary since the total number of cameras exceeds one server. With IP video surveillance software more than 200 cameras can be managed and recorded using a single, energy efficient server, which normally takes 2U of rack space (about half the typical rack space of a single 16 channel DVR).

Virtualization also improves resiliency of the IP surveillance deployment because existing IT staff are already maintaining the server and network infrastructure. Since this hardware is used by other mission critical applications which are core to the business, IP surveillance freely benefits from this enhanced availability without adding additional support costs.