Comparing Quantum VS-HCI Series and StorMagic ARQvault

This article, published on October 27, 2021, was written by Jerome M. Wendt, president and founder, DCIG LLC.

StorMagic and Quantum in Focus as Spotlight on Video Surveillance Grows

Quantum’s acquisition of Pivot3 in July 2021 cast a spotlight on video surveillance in general and Pivot3 in particular. Enterprises expect video surveillance solutions to deliver much more robust features than simple video capture, storage, and archival. While they still need those features, they also want high-speed video capture and retrieval, real-time viewing, and analytics.

StorMagic ARQvault and Quantum VS-HCI Series video surveillance solutions represent 2 video surveillance solutions that merit enterprise attention. While both offer video surveillance solutions, they differ in their feature set, their architecture, and the challenges they address.

Their differences exemplify the need for enterprises to step back and examine both solutions. Each one employs different techniques to scale, manage their respective offering, and address a common video surveillance conundrum.

These differences impact their ease of deployment, administration, end user experience, and solution costs.

They specifically differ in the following 3 ways
• Economical infrastructure flexibility and scalability
• Comprehensive, holistic VMS software
• HA and scalability at the edge

Differentiator #1: Economical Infrastructure Flexibility and Scalability
To achieve optimal efficiencies, enterprises ideally want a video surveillance solution to deliver on the following two objectives that facilitate:
1 Easily and economically scaling their back end storage infrastructure
2 Fast and easy access to all their video assets, irrespective of their age

Delivering on these 2 requirements creates the following conundrum for many video surveillance solutions.

Video Surveillance Conundrum
Enterprise video surveillance has 3 challenges it must address:
1 Rapid video ingestion
2 Multi-petabyte storage requirements
3 Fast video access

Solving the first challenge is relatively simple and straightforward. Using HDDs as a storage target during video capture facilitates rapid video ingestion.

After that, video surveillance solutions must make trade-offs between cost and speed to address the last two challenges. Storing all aging videos (seven days or older) on low-cost media such as tape dramatically reduces costs. However, video access may take a long time. Conversely, storing all video on disk provides fast access times but at a hefty cost compared to other media, such as tape.

This predicament creates the conundrum. Enterprises rarely if ever need to access aged video surveillance again. However, if needed, they frequently need it immediately. These 2 solutions offer different infrastructures to address this conundrum.

Differentiator #2: Comprehensive, Holistic VMS Software
Video management system (VMS) software functions as the cornerstone for any video surveillance solution. In addition to collecting, managing, and storing recorded video, it also provides an interface to view live and recorded video.

All VMS software delivers on these core features. These 2 solutions differ, sometimes dramatically, in how well they deliver on each of them. Enterprises should therefore ideally know their video surveillance needs upfront before selecting a video surveillance solution from either of these providers.

Differentiator #3: HA and Scalability at Edge
As video surveillance becomes more critical to enterprises, creating highly available environments to host VMS software takes on more importance.

HCI technology becomes particularly desirable to deploy in edge environments as it:
• Delivers HA
• Simplifies deployment and management of highly available solutions
• Makes adding more storage capacity to an HCI cluster a routine task
• Meets new edge requirements such as hosting VMS software or performing analytics

Both VS-HCI Series/Pivot3 and ARQvault offer video surveillance solutions with great storage options for enterprise customers. However, they differ in features and functionality.

Despite all the positives associated with HCI solutions, they do come with one notable downside. HCI solutions may become costly to deploy since most of them require at least 3 physical servers in each site to provide HA. Both StorMagic and Quantum offer HCI solutions but deliver them in different ways to provide HA and scalability at the edge.

In short, Quantum’s VS-HCI Series solution offers solid HCI and disk storage for VMS software applications. In contrast, StorMagic provides a complete VMS solution with software that can store video data on any disk storage type. This includes the Quantum VS-HCI Series (formerly Pivot 3) or any lower cost tier like tape, optical or cloud.

Note: Quantum and StorMagic are clients of DCIG.