United States / Canada - English
Sign out
-
MIT is trustworthy
QNAP is a Taiwanese brand and a leading video surveillance solutions provider with secure and reliable Surveillance NAS solutions.
-
30% cost saving
The solution can be quickly deployed without needing many IT staff, as it also comes with comprehensive customer technical support for the surveillance system.
-
Compatible with 95% IP CAM in the market
It can be deployed in large-scale using ONVIF® cameras, is compatible with up to 95% of IP cameras on the market, and efficiently manages videos through a central surveillance platform.
-
Centralized management of 256 surveillance servers
The surveillance management software allows you to centrally manage up to 256 surveillance servers and up to 1600 cameras for real-time video retrieval and playback.
-
100% flexible applications
QNAP’s NVR API is open source, allowing enterprises to flexibly and effectively integrate NVR systems with other automation applications.
Solution Brief
How Surveillance NAS can become the best enterprise surveillance solution
During business intelligence transformation in factories, surveillance applications are placed in various production links to optimize production processes and increase production value. Enterprise decision makers must determine how to create an intelligent surveillance system that meets the needs of diverse scenarios, as it is a key part in successfully transforming manufacturing into a smarter, intelligence-led process. There are some key pain points of enterprise surveillance applications: simple and rapid system deployment, good return on investment, high-efficiency surveillance system management, highly-stable operating system, and flexible and customized smart factory application integration.
In the crowded surveillance market, the all-in-one Surveillance NAS, which integrates video storage hardware and image management software, is a breakthrough from traditional surveillance systems, and has full potential to become the first choice for enterprises when building a surveillance system environment, and has brought a new wave of subversive surveillance technology to the surveillance market!
Three mainstream NVR solutions
Current video surveillance solutions are mainly divided into three types of NVR (Network Video Recording) solutions, including traditional embedded NVR, widely used PC-based NVR, and All-in-one Surveillance NAS with a high degree of hardware and software integration. When selecting a suitable surveillance solution, enterprises usually evaluate: deployment cost and time, labor cost, number of supported camera channels, camera compatibility, multi-point centralized management, backup, availability, customized software and hardware integration, and more.
-
Common Embedded NVRs
Such NVR uses dedicated hardware and embedded operating systems, has simple structure, is easy to install and operate, does not require much maintenance personnel and has relatively low deployment cost, but the simple structure also limits the capabilities of surveillance applications, as there are fewer channels, and not many camera models are supported by the system. For enterprises with multi-site and multi-point surveillance deployment, embedded NVR cannot really solve the pain points of enterprise usage.
-
PC-based NVR with highly-complex configuration
PC-based NVR is where the video management software (VMS) is installed in a hardware device configured by a specific manufacturer. This type of solution can achieve large-scale deployment and support a large number of channel recordings due to the wide choice of hardware and high degree of customization for performance and space. However, although the functions of PC-based NVR are relatively complete compared with embedded NVR, enterprises often find it difficult to deal with unreasonable prices and high-complexity of the PC NVR market. PC NVR system needs to be maintained by specific IT staff, and every time a new backup unit (failover) is added, it must be rebuilt. Complicated or proprietary hardware architecture often has compatibility issues, and enterprises are often at the mercy of manufacturers and find it difficult to manage the whole system. Video management software and hardware of PC-based NVRs are supplied by different manufacturers. Once a problem occurs in the system, it is difficult to clearly divide the responsibility for software and hardware maintenance, and more time is needed to clarify problems between enterprises and manufacturers, thus making it more difficult to maintain the system.
-
Surveillance NAS with integrated hardware and software
NAS is a professional storage server. Traditionally NAS were used as simple storage devices but their functionality has grown with the advance of hardware and software capabilities. NAS has combined computing and network storage features with operating system management and surveillance apps to enter the video surveillance market by way of software and hardware integration. The new type of Surveillance NAS overcomes the shortcomings of embedded NVR and PC-based NVR. Compared with the limited surveillance capabilities of embedded NVR, Surveillance NAS has wider camera support. Because of its advantages of software and hardware integration, it has a simpler and faster deployment structure than PC-based NVRs for mass deployment and management. The overall cost is more controllable and predictable.
The all-round Surveillance NAS not only has the advantages of large capacity, high expandability and high transmission efficiency, but is also quicker to deploy. A wider range of cameras are supported, and comprehensive backup and availability options add essential functionality for enterprises.
How to choose a surveillance solution for decentralized fields requiring hundreds of surveillance channels?
Confronted with the challenge of emerging carmakers, a well-established international carmaker urgently needs to introduce smart factory solutions to improve production and efficiency. It also needs to introduce a suitable factory surveillance solution while expanding intelligent production. The manager responsible for the transformation of the factory area had to install 60 surveillance cameras for each of the 5 production factories. With a total number of 300 cameras for a huge amount of video recording, cross-factory monitoring became a big challenge. With real-time video surveillance and security management in production lines, warehouses, regional offices, and staff restaurants, the IT director of the carmaker must choose the most cost-effective surveillance solution under a limited budget.
-
Cost is the first consideration
For the purpose of intelligent production transformation, the carmaker has already invested huge resources to restructure the production lines. Therefore, the IT director only has a small budget when choosing a smart surveillance solution, and cost is the first consideration. Besides the initial deployment cost, the IT director is more concerned about the integration, compatibility, openness, ease of maintenance, and ease of replication of the overall system, so that when the system needs to be updated and expanded later, there is no need for additional investment to retrain employees.
-
Decentralized configuration, centralized management
The carmaker's cross-factory surveillance solution must be able to efficiently and centrally manage the surveillance screens, so that each factory, production process quality control and remote management team can quickly find out and solve problems through video playback or analysis to ensure the smooth operation of the factory. Therefore, centralized management of cross-factory surveillance channels is a necessity.
-
Recording server failover and fault tolerance
To ensure the smooth flow of large-scale production lines, production quality monitoring and factory safety, there should be no interruptions or omissions in the surveillance system. A comprehensive failover plan and a reliable fault-tolerant backup solution can help prevent unexpected system failures and ensure uninterrupted recording so that important videos are not lost.
-
Video backup and data protection
To avoid accidental damage or loss of important surveillance footage, enterprises will choose local storage or cloud storage services no matter short-term or long-term. According to safety regulations, surveillance videos must be stored for at least 180 days. Therefore, it is necessary to choose a secure and scalable storage device.
-
Flexible API customization potential
The concept of intelligent factory requires the integrated systems to be real-time, stable and efficient. The surveillance solution chosen by the IT director needs to use APIs extensively to link information between multiple systems and report events in real time, and each production link needs to conform to standardized production. If the surveillance system lacks software customization and event definition is not flexible enough, the investment in intelligent factories would not be of much value.
QNAP Surveillance NAS, a solution that meets enterprise needs
QNAP provides a one-stop surveillance system solution using NAS with its own application software as an enterprise surveillance server, and supports highly expandable storage space. QNAP Surveillance NAS can be used to quickly build a large-scale surveillance system. It is compatible with a wider range of cameras than embedded NVR, and the overall deployment cost is also lower than that of PC-based NVR. The simple structure makes subsequent system maintenance and operation easier and faster, which is the main reason why the IT director of the carmaker chose QNAP Surveillance NAS.
- Multiple advantages of Surveillance NAS:
-
Save 30% in cost, including: system deployment, unit cost of video channel, manpower, and time.
-
High camera compatibility, supports more than 200+ brands and more than 8,000 cameras, and the ONVIF® standard.
-
Video surveillance control center, which centrally manages the cross-factory surveillance screens from the headquarters.
-
Failover backup mechanism, uninterrupted surveillance.
-
QNAP provide comprehensive support in deployment, maintenance, technical consultation, and troubleshooting.
-
Free NVR API resources allow surveillance data to be easily integrated with existing management processes and systems.
-
QNAP's exclusive built-in AI face recognition is suitable for managing people flow, access controls, and event analysis in multiple scenes.
-
It can be used in parallel with an enterprise's existing surveillance facilities, and can be partially placed or replaced without replacing the camera and rewiring.
The manager of the carmaker said: “as necessitated by the needs of rapid expansion and automated production, we have two primary considerations when choosing a surveillance system - cost and technical services. Compared with the previous PC-based NVR, the surveillance software and storage hardware integration provided by QNAP Surveillance NAS has greatly reduced the cost of video channel and deployment cost by 30%, so it's an ideal choice! ”
“Through the QVR Center CMS, five automated factories can be managed at the same time, with a total of hundreds of video channels.Our managers can view and replay specific footage as soon as an incident occurs, which greatly facilitates production crisis management and improves efficiency. ”
Maximum cost-effectiveness from initial deployment to long-term use and maintenance
Large-scale video surveillance in distributed areas often requires huge investment in deployment and maintenance, including cameras, cabling, software authorization, IT management and personnel training. The QNAP Surveillance NAS video surveillance solution provides an all-in-one solution that integrates surveillance software and storage hardware and meets all the surveillance needs of enterprises, with at least 30% cost savings for carmakers. In addition, QNAP Surveillance NAS supports more than 200+ brands and more than 8,000 camera models on the market, as well as any ONVIF®-certified camera, making it very easy to choose different product combinations from different brands and more flexible in system planning and procurement.
Surveillance system troubleshooting is often a pain point for many enterprise users. PC-based NVRs are usually built with different brands of software and hardware systems. When a system failure occurs, it is difficult to find out the real cause and who is truly responsible. QNAP Surveillance NAS has high software and hardware integration, and provides complete technical consulting and support services, which can assist carmakers in long-term system maintenance and timely troubleshooting; QNAP provides a single service window for regional customers, and is more efficient when customers need support services.
Use CMS to centrally monitor five factories and establish fault backup to prevent footage loss
Each of the five factories has installed 60 surveillance cameras. Each factory is not only responsible for their own factory surveillance, but also needs to send important camera channels to the central control system of the headquarters in real time, so that the production managers of the headquarters can know the conditions of each factory. Through the QVR Center, the Surveillance NAS at the headquarters can be set as the central control center for video surveillance. It can remotely monitor the camera channels from the five factories and receive multi-point event notifications to know the status at first time and improve management efficiency.
In addition, QNAP also provides a highly stable video fault-tolerant transfer mechanism to ensure uninterrupted video surveillance. Although PC NVR can also be configured with video backup, it is both expensive and cumbersome to build an additional backup server. With the QNAP Surveillance NAS solution, there is no need for the carmaker to spend much extra budget, manpower and time for backup and failover. As long as QVR Guard is installed in a Surveillance NAS, the NAS can become a backup server to quickly continue recording tasks, and be prepared for critical moments.
Using the QVR Center management software, you can centrally monitor and manage up to 256 surveillance servers (Surveillance NAS) and over 1600 cameras across multiple factory locations. You can also instantly retrieve and play recordings, and view the operational status of each Surveillance NAS, server number, connected camera channel count, operating system version, and related surveillance software settings for each Surveillance NAS in real-time.
Depending on permissions, the surveillance manager can select a specific Surveillance NAS server to view all connected cameras of the selected one, and easily drag and combine recordings on the QVR Center UI.
Through filtering in QVR Center, you can also directly enter the Surveillance NAS name to search for a specific Surveillance NAS and camera.
Quickly set up a VPN network and efficiently restore the backup of the headquarter surveillance videos at different points
According to the carmaker's safety regulations, the surveillance videos of multiple factories must be backed up to the server room in the headquarters. To solve the problem of transferring large amounts of data across network segments, the IT director has chosen to use QNAP's exclusive QuWAN SD-WAN software-defined WAN technology. QuWAN can easily establish Mesh VPN among multiple devices such as QNAP Surveillance NAS and routers across regions and allow surveillance videos of the five factory areas to be safely backed up to the headquarters. This not only allows more efficient centralized management and backup of surveillance videos, but also eliminates the need for cumbersome VPN or cabling.
The headquarters has also configured QNAP NAS and storage expansion devices to save the surveillance videos of each factory area and complete the huge file storage of up to 300 video channels, a total of 1.5 PB. QNAP Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) is also used to enable the 3-2-1 backup strategy by saving recordings to cloud storage.
Free NVR API to provide customized surveillance application integration
QNAP provides free API resources for carmakers to integrate Surveillance NAS applications with existing production line systems or management systems according to their needs (including notification systems, IP camera controls, production line code history, personnel management, AIoT-related applications, and more). Flexible integration and deployment bring great added value to intelligent factory management, and also help to save costs and reduce manpower.
The QNAP Surveillance NAS solution can also be combined with the QNAP AI video analysis application to help carmakers establish intelligent access control management, AI face recognition and fast search for event videos and create an all-round surveillance application with high efficiency and high security.
At the end, the factory manager expressed his satisfaction: “The surveillance software services provided by QNAP range from software and hardware integration to open API resources, which allows us to flexibly connect with internal systems with many application possibilities! Our experience has shown that QNAP has more advantages than other surveillance service providers, and its technology is also quite advanced. This is an important reason why we finally chose QNAP.”
Mesh structured central video control and video backup
The international carmaker uses Surveillance NAS and QNAP related surveillance software platform for monitoring applications across five factories. Applications range from the CMS central control platform QVR Center to QVR Pro, which is directly connected to and manages cameras equipped with Surveillance NAS, as well as the video backup management suite QVR Guard, and more. With QNAP QuWAN as the enterprise's huge cross-regional surveillance system, it is easy to establish a Mesh VPN network to monitor video backup and store videos back to the headquarters for centralized management and security. QNAP QuWAN uses a mesh topology architecture that is conducive to Multi-point IT deployment with high stability and security. Even if a connected network is interrupted in the established VPN architecture, there are other alternative paths to reconnect. As a network backup mechanism, it is different from the star topology of traditional VPN, where the entire system will be affected if one of the lines is disconnected.
Surveillance NAS is best for mainstream modern surveillance
The new Surveillance NAS is best in terms of overall cost, camera compatibility, deployment scale, centralized management and video backup. It overcomes the shortcomings of embedded NVR and PC-based NVR and has multiple advantages to allow enterprises to create a more adaptable surveillance environment. For enterprise organizations with PC-based NVRs, Surveillance NAS can also be easily added as a partial upgrade to the existing PC-based NVR architecture and deployed side-by-side.
QNAP Surveillance NAS can assist enterprises and organizations to quickly create an ideal and cost-effective all-round video surveillance solution to meet local integration and future expansion requirements. In terms of cost, functionality, management, service, and many other factors, it is the solution that is most in line with mainstream modern surveillance.
Do you have planning requirements for enterprise surveillance and video storage solutions?
