Product specifications

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
252
As with any other system, maintenance is an important and vital part
of sustained operation. The NSM5200 incorporates various
innovations to make maintenance more efficient and to allow the
system to continue operating at peak performance levels. Easy access
to hard disk drives and the CompactFlash card is available from the
front panel. A unique rail system allows access to a failed fan should
it need to be replaced. Temperature sensors throughout the chassis
detect possible air-flow obstruction or clogged intake filters. The use
of enterprise-class SAS
®
technology provides advanced enclosure
management and monitoring. Notifications of potential or actual
issues are transmitted to the specified user interfaces for action.
Storage capacity is scaled using third-party storage arrays with an
optional fibre channel interface.
Software Built for Flexibility, Reliability, Cost
Optimization
In addition to unique strains placed on hardware components,
surveillance applications also demand innovations in software.
Recording software must accommodate automatic failover should a
catastrophic failure occur. Recording software must deal with file
fragmentation caused by overwrite, locking of video clips, and
managing metadata associated with alarms and events. Finally,
recording software must deal with the escalating cost of storage by
finding innovative ways to manage recorded content. This ensures
that the user extracts the most value from the cost of the storage
subsystem.
The NSM5200 supports pooling of multiple recorders to provide for
automatic load balancing and failover. Up to twenty NSM5200 nodes
can be placed into the same storage pool. One of the NSM5200s in
the pool acts as the master and manages the assignment of incoming
streams, health monitoring, and redistribution of the recording load.
Should a unit fail, the given streams are automatically redistributed
to the remaining units in the storage pool. When the failed unit is
brought back on-line, the recording load is distributed again such
that the load on any given recorder is balanced. This capability also
allows users to dynamically add additional storage to a pool as their
retention needs change.
The NSM5200 incorporates an improved version of Pelco’s patented
EnduraStor
™
storage optimization technology. EnduraStor was
developed to manage the cost of storing high resolution, high-frame
rate video by leveraging the fact that the value of recorded video is
typically higher immediately following an incident. Organizations are
capable of specifying a desired delay period during which all
recorded video will be kept at 30 images per second (25 for PAL). As
the age of video available on hard disk drives exceeds the delay
period, it is automatically groomed to a lower frame rate, thus
freeing up storage capacity for new data. The NSM5200
incorporates advancements in the EnduraStor algorithm, which gives
administrators the option of classifying the priority level of alarm or
event video to retain the full frame rate.
The NSM5200 is built upon the proven stability and robustness of its
Linux
®
-based operating system. It utilizes an XFS file system and
automated defragmentation routines to keep the database from
becoming fragmented. XFS has been proven to be a more superior
file format for the rigors of surveillance recording applications than
an NTFS file system, which is standard with Windows
®
-based
recorders.
The NSM5200 incorporates a number of diagnostic monitoring
functions that serve vital roles in notifying operators of potential
problems and failures. Integrated diagnostics utilize on-board LED
indicators to display warnings and failures on the NSM5200 and
then it reports these failures to operators. The NSM5200 monitors
and provides warning messages for items such as retention time
issues, accumulation of software errors, network errors that result in
packet loss, and changes to network link speeds. It also monitors and
reports hardware diagnostics such as temperatures approaching
established thresholds, hard disk drive failures, fan failures, power
supply failures, or when a stream or a NSM5200 is off line. Finally,
the NSM5200 can communicate to an APC Smart-UPS
®
series
uninterruptible power supply to provide battery status information
and initiate a graceful shutdown if the available charge falls below
its designated threshold.
Apac Specbook.book Page 252 Tuesday, November 16, 2010 10:10 AM