01
Client Profile & Background
A large manufacturing enterprise operating in Bekasi, West Java, with over 500 CCTV cameras across multiple production facilities, warehouses, and office buildings. The company is a tier-1 supplier for automotive and electronics industries, requiring strict quality and security monitoring. Their existing surveillance system consisted of 20 standalone NVRs from various vendors, each managing 20-30 cameras locally. Storage capacity averaged 4TB per NVR, providing only 15 days of retention at 1080p resolution. The IT team managed these devices manually, with no centralized monitoring or backup. Compliance with corporate security policies demanded a minimum 90-day retention for all cameras, especially in production areas. Additionally, the company was expanding its factory footprint, adding 100 more cameras within the next year. The existing ad-hoc approach was unsustainable, leading to frequent storage overruns, lost footage, and high administrative overhead. The enterprise needed a scalable, enterprise-grade CCTV storage retention solution that could integrate with their existing Lenovo servers and Microsoft Active Directory for access control.
02
Technical Challenge
The primary challenge was meeting the 90-day retention requirement across 500 cameras recording 24/7 at 5MP resolution, 15 FPS. The total raw storage needed was calculated at 1.2PB, assuming H.265 compression. However, the existing NVRs were a mix of H.264 and H.265, with inconsistent bitrates. The peak recording rate was 2.5 Gbps, overwhelming the 1GbE network links. Moreover, the company experienced 12-hour backup failures due to insufficient bandwidth to the off-site backup location. The IT team reported that 30% of footage was lost during power outages because NVRs lacked battery backup and automatic restart. Another critical issue was retrieval speed: searching for a specific event across multiple NVRs took hours, impacting incident response. The existing system also lacked integration with the access control system, making forensic analysis cumbersome. The enterprise needed a solution that could consolidate storage, provide high availability, and enable fast search and playback. The technical requirements included: centralized storage with RAID 6 protection, 10GbE network backbone, automated backup to a secondary site, and integration with hyperconverged infrastructure for management simplicity.
03
Implemented Solution
Intilogy designed and deployed a centralized CCTV storage retention architecture using Synology RackStation RS3617RPxs and QNAP TVS-EC1680U units. The primary storage consisted of two Synology RS3617RPxs in a high-availability cluster, each with 12x 14TB WD Gold HDDs in RAID 6, providing 168TB usable per unit. This was complemented by a QNAP TVS-EC1680U with 16x 14TB for nearline archival of footage older than 60 days. The network was upgraded to 10GbE using Cisco switches, with iSCSI connections for direct storage access. For video management, we deployed Microsoft Windows Server 2019 running Milestone XProtect Corporate, which supports up to 10,000 cameras. Backup and disaster recovery were handled by Veeam Backup & Replication, which replicated video metadata and configuration to a secondary site equipped with Lenovo ThinkSystem servers. The solution also integrated with the existing cybersecurity framework, encrypting video data using AES-256. Power protection was provided by APC Smart-UPS units with network management cards, ensuring graceful shutdown and auto-restart. The entire system was monitored via IT infrastructure management tools, with alerts for disk failures, temperature, and capacity thresholds.
04
Results & ROI
The new CCTV storage retention solution delivered immediate and measurable improvements. The RPO (Recovery Point Objective) for video footage was reduced from 24 hours to less than 1 hour, thanks to Veeam's continuous replication. The RTO (Recovery Time Objective) for restoring a failed storage node dropped from 48 hours to 4 hours, using the Synology high-availability cluster. Total storage capacity scaled to 1.5PB, comfortably exceeding the 90-day retention requirement with 20% headroom. Network utilization improved with 10GbE, eliminating bottlenecks. The IT team reported a 70% reduction in time spent on storage management, as the centralized system automated retention policies and health checks. Footage retrieval time for a specific event decreased from hours to under 5 minutes, thanks to Milestone's smart search indexing. The enterprise also achieved compliance with corporate security audits, avoiding potential fines. The total cost of ownership was 30% lower than the previous ad-hoc setup when factoring in reduced downtime and administrative overhead. The solution's scalability allowed seamless addition of 100 new cameras without additional storage hardware. Finally, the integration with backup and disaster recovery ensured business continuity, even during a recent power outage that lasted 6 hours—no footage was lost.
