Contact Us

Digital Video Surveillance Storage Tackled with E-Series

The global Digital Video Surveillance market was valued at over $47 billion last year and is predicted to grow to $86 billion by 2024*. Nearly half of last year’s revenue spend was in China as it determinedly implements its Xue Liang program of national surveillance, but elsewhere new demands and new DVS technology are driving powerful growth. Obviously, we are all aware of the need for such systems when it comes to public safety/counterterrorism and compliance, but drone detection, AI and forensic video analytics are some of the new areas that will continue to drive the demand. While additional functionality will mean that the video recorder/post-processor software component cost of a surveillance system will increase as a percentage of the total implementation cost, currently two-thirds of today’s global spend is on hardware. The video cameras themselves represent half of that spend, while the digital storage solution used to retain the visual data is a very significant proportion of the rest. So, making the right choice of storage system is a key business decision.

The main drivers influencing a DVS solution’s storage requirements are the number of camera feeds the system is expected to simultaneously ingest, the image quality of video streams in terms of picture resolution (pixels) and frame rate (frames per second) and the length of time these video streams are required to be stored. Businesses such as retail, restaurants and banking who do not need high quality and are recording at 10fps/352×240 resolution will find that 1TB of storage will provide approximately 266 days of 24×7 recording from one camera**. For schools, airports and public utilities where higher quality is needed to better spot suspicious behaviour and aid suspect identification, a 20fps/704×480 camera feed will use up 1TB in just 40 days. Additionally, such systems generally require more cameras/feeds to allow security staff to be effective. At the high end, facial recognition systems require almost motion picture quality but that means, at 30fps/1280×1024, 1TB will be used in just 8 days’ worth of recording. Additionally, as such AI systems develop, the data they hold has more long-term value and so requirements such as redundancy, backup and compliance are becoming factors to consider in a market where they were little considered historically. Further, the requirements to increase storage capacity are constrained to fit into close quarters control rooms – and cramped budgets.


Scaling from 36TB to an incredible 2.2PB  and with 2 to an industry beating 20 ports of iSCSI connectivity, the Nexsan E-Series P  can record at a rate of 5,400MB/s and has been specifically designed to handle hundreds of parallel surveillance streams from high-resolution video sources without frame-drops. Redundant components such as controllers, power supplies and fans keep systems running 24×7. If a component fails. Nexsan’s Active Drawer TechnologyTM keeps systems operational during maintenance such as adding in new drives or swapping other components and, coupled with Nexans’s Cool Drive TechnologyTM and anti-vibration design, contributes to an always-on surveillance operation. Nexsan E-Series P is a workhorse for today’s digital video and media solutions and is a clear choice for digital video surveillance deployments.



Grahame Morrison is E-Series & BEAST Product Management Director