Application of Network Attached Storage (NAS) in the Security Industry

From the rapid development in my country in recent years, it can be predicted that NAS storage will penetrate into various industries in my country at a faster speed than in foreign countries. In foreign countries, NAS devices have become the preferred device for network data storage, and the annual growth rate is 66.5%.

NAS (Network Attached Storage)

NAS, the full name of which is Network Attached Storage, is a dedicated data storage server. It is data-centric, completely separates storage devices from servers, and manages data in a centralized manner, thereby freeing up bandwidth, improving performance, reducing total cost of ownership, and protecting investment. Its cost is much lower than using server storage, while its efficiency is much higher than the latter. NAS can meet the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises that want to reduce storage costs but cannot afford the expensive price of SAN, and has a very good performance-price ratio.

Which industries can use NAS devices? First, check whether the core business of the unit is based on a certain information system, which has high requirements for data security; second, check whether the information system has or will have a large amount of data to be stored, and has high requirements for data management; finally, you can also determine whether there are heterogeneous platforms in the network, or whether they will be used in the future. If the answer to any of the above questions is yes, then it is necessary to focus on using NAS devices.

Application of Network Attached Storage in Security Industry

With the rapid development of computer network technology, video surveillance systems are currently in the stage of transformation from digital video surveillance systems represented by DVR digital video recorders to network video surveillance systems represented by NVS servers, network video servers, IP Cameras and the recently emerging NVR network video recorders. In this transitional stage, the vast majority of applications are hybrid digital and network systems, and Network DVR is one of them.

Compared with digital video surveillance, the network video surveillance system based on IP protocol can build a larger-scale, more complex, more flexible and more scalable application system. Its core part is a set of intelligent video surveillance management software with wide compatibility and high integration, which connects the monitoring system and computer network/information management system, allowing the two independent systems to merge, thus realizing the true integration of three networks (data, voice and video images).

A complete set of intelligent video surveillance management software can be applied to the centralized monitoring and management of unlimited digital video image equipment, access control systems, professional alarm hosts, and environmental monitoring equipment in large and medium-sized IP network video surveillance environments, and can be closely integrated with computer information management systems such as GIS geographic information systems. Since network video surveillance is based on network audio and video stream transmission, the performance of the video surveillance management server will be greatly affected in the case of large amounts of audio and video stream transmission. The more data, the more complex the scheduling of I/O operations and cache management of the video surveillance management server becomes. Frequent access to storage devices requires a large amount of resources, affecting its processing capacity.

If the storage application of the video surveillance management server is based on a local hard disk or external disk array solution such as DAS, these problems usually occur:

Storage is difficult to expand and cannot be expanded online. Installation and maintenance are relatively complicated.

The functions of data processing and data storage are not separated. The frequent access of the video surveillance management server to storage devices such as local hard disks or external disk arrays requires a large amount of system resources, which reduces the ability to process streaming data.

Storage utilization is low and data sharing is difficult;

Single point failures are prone to occur. When a logical or physical failure occurs in the local hard disk or external disk array, all stored data may be lost, resulting in application interruption.

In contrast, NAS (Network Access Storage) is more suitable for the new generation of network video surveillance system applications. Network video surveillance systems support distributed network storage, which can be expanded at any time as needed. Storage devices can be distributed anywhere in the network, and storage backup strategies can be flexibly formulated.