New to their server storage line from BCDVideo, the manufacturer of video surveillance hardware, is the Aurora Server Series. Taken from the Latin term for “dawn,” the US-based company says it marks the dawn of a new era in DVR replacement video recording.
The firm says that any surveillance video should be considered critical data, regardless of number of cameras. The Aurora series are built for the under 50-camera market, but with system throughput of over 400Mbps, they possess the bandwidth to scale to 100 cameras. They feature edundant power, 12Gb/s RAID controller with 2GB of Flash Based Write Cache, hot-pluggable hard drives, and server-grade CPU’s with 10000 PassMark rating.
Jeff Burgess, BCDVideo president, said: “No one should have to settle for ‘just another box’. The market is already pretty cluttered with those. The days of sacrificing important features such as redundancy and true drive protection for price are over. Superior technological advantages have finally come to the under-50 high-megapixel, long retention camera video recorder market. We know, because we just delivered it.”
The manufacturer points to its use of HGST helium drives which feature a reliability rating of 2.5M MTBF. The drives used are the same being used in high-availability NAS and SAN systems.
Tom Larson, BCDVideo’s Director of Sales and Engineering, said: “The 6TB and 8TB helium hard drives are an exciting upgrade. These drives double the performance of the 24×7 drive, which doubled the PC drive. Desktop drives are still standard equipment in so many systems which, I have to admit, is a bit mind-boggling. We wanted to engineer this series with many of the features found in our Nova Series. It was challenging for us to bring new technology in to produce the best video storage server and deliver it into a market that buys primarily on price. We definitely succeeded.”
The patented helium drives are hermetically-sealed. This keeps air and other contaminates out of the drive, making them suitable the firm says for harsh or ambient sites. The helium inside the drives also reduce disk vibration and flutter, for reliability. As for power efficiency, they average 23pc lower operating power than traditional drives, it is claimed, resulting in lower power and cooling costs. The drive uses a portion of its own DRAM as a persistent cache, resulting in greater random access speeds, optimised workloads, and high throughput, the makers add.
The Aurora Series consists of tower and rack-mount units which range from 6TB to 120TB of total storage, with RAID5/6 protection and includes a worldwide, five-year, on-site, next business day warranty.
Larson adds: “It’s really all about treating every site as mission critical. That’s the mentality to which we have always built our servers, and that’s the same mentality we share regarding the escalated support for our products. These days, shouldn’t all captured video be treated as mission critical? Regardless if the site is a retail store with four cameras or a school district with 1,000 of them? We believe it should, because no doubt it’s critical to you.”
Visit: bcdvideo.com/auroroa-server-series/.
