{"id":28004,"date":"2019-03-01T22:52:39","date_gmt":"2019-03-02T04:52:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bcdvideo.com\/?p=28004"},"modified":"2022-10-26T12:45:00","modified_gmt":"2022-10-26T17:45:00","slug":"video-surveillance-networks-resiliency-and-high-availability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bcdvideo.com\/blog\/video-surveillance-networks-resiliency-and-high-availability\/","title":{"rendered":"Video Surveillance Networks, Resiliency, and High Availability"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
In the video surveillance space, highly available solutions have become the new standard for any form of mission-critical deployment. It is now commonplace to see even mid-level solutions use features that use to be only for high-end hardware, including RAID 5\/6 disk protection, redundant power, and the use of local and remote failover servers.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
What often gets overlooked is the underlying network infrastructure and its resiliency and high availability. Evaluating the network that the physical security solution will deploy on, is critical when choosing a proper infrastructure.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
When determining the level of availability that a network needs, it is essential to ask these questions:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Resiliency and high availability can be accomplished by combining multiple forms of hardware and network architecture to complete the solution. These features include protocol based, hardware based, and infrastructure-based resiliency options. It is also critical to make a distinction between resiliency, fault-tolerance, and high availability. Resilient networks may not necessarily be highly available, since they can withstand or recover from an error or failure but may not deliver always-on performance.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
On the physical\/hardware level, many steps can be taken to ensure a network switch stays online. One of the most common forms of increased availability at the hardware level is redundant power. An often-overlooked issue with networking hardware\u00a0<\/a>is ensuring that the solution installed is up to the spec needed for the project. Deploying entry-level switches into an environment that demands a high-end switch\u2019s higher processing power will eventually lead to a device failure.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Employing various protocols to increase a network\u2019s resiliency, convergence time, and performance. These protocols range from commonly used, easy to deploy protocols like Link Aggregation Control Protocol<\/strong> (LACP), Spanning Tree Protocol<\/strong> (STP), to more complex protocols like Open Shortest Path First<\/strong> (OSPF) and Protocol Independent Multicast<\/strong> (PIM). IEEE 802.1aq<\/strong>, aka Shortest Path Bridging<\/a><\/strong>, is simple to deploy and a versatile protocol to enable high availability within a network.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n