Milestone Expands Solution Certification

Milestone Systems announces fully reported performance certification of Milestone Solution Partners with IT infrastructure components such as servers, storage, and workstation products. The first to achieve this comprehensive process with documented results are HP, NetApp, PROMISE Technology and Razberi, with several others in progress.

The IT infrastructure, server, storage and client platforms are integral parts of a video surveillance management system, so miscalculation on server or storage requirements impacts the success of a system's operation, resulting in support calls. Milestone has therefore been working extensively with IT infrastructure vendors to ensure their systems are optimized for the Milestone XProtect® product family, and that the infrastructure vendors understand how to specify, build and deliver optimal systems for the customer environment.

The Milestone Solution Certification for IT infrastructure vendor products provides verification of the components being interoperable and optimized for performance with XProtect VMS. The certification process results in documentation of a solution's proven maturity and quality, and differentiation from non-certified components for a competitive market advantage.

Each certification project consists of three phases, beginning with two scenarios, where there is both a benchmark test and a maximum performance test. During each test, statistics from the Milestone XProtect Recording Servers are gathered to judge the performance of the system as a platform for video recording. After the tests are conducted, this data is analyzed and the findings are presented in a full report, with details on the configuration of the test system and a summary.

These tests identify that a given system meets minimum expected performance thresholds based on known benchmarks. The certification also measures the maximum number of cameras, at a given frame rate, resolution and codec that can be supported by the server and storage system.

The end result is a definition of the system's capabilities compared to the known benchmark values, which are also used by Milestone to create generic server and storage recommendations. The end result is the certification of the server/storage products' operational performance capabilities in the known environment. The documentation outlines how best to tune the product for the Milestone XProtect platform.

The Solution Certification full report includes a ‘known good' (optimal) configuration for a surveillance system using the Milestone XProtect VMS and the solution partner's products. The optimal configuration contains the solution architecture, the performance results, use-case information, detailed system configurations for both the XProtect VMS components and the solution partner's products.

"Integrators and end users can reference the known good configuration data from the Milestone certification process to help build a solution with confidence. They get documented proof that these video surveillance solutions operate within the parameters of the maximum performance test results," says Christian Bohn, VP Strategic Alliances at Milestone Systems. "Certifying our partners is not new - we have been doing it successfully for several years with software integrations, and the expansion of this with the hardware vendors is natural to build continuing trust in Milestone for both partners and customers."

"This solution certification gives Milestone customers the peace of mind that Razberi appliances meet the performance benchmarks required by XProtect solutions. The detailed performance results from the certification process are available to all of our system integrators and customers," says Tom Galvin, President of Razberi Technologies.

"We are very pleased that the Vess A2000 Series NVR storage appliance is one of the first IT infrastructure components to be certified by Milestone," said Jack Yang, Senior Product Planning and Marketing Manager, PROMISE Technology. "As a Milestone Certified Solution, Vess has been tested extensively with XProtect to ensure channel partners and customers a reliable and well-performing solution as well as an optimal user experience."

"Video surveillance places performance and high capacity demands on storage subsystems, and we are pleased to work with Milestone to ensure that NetApp storage systems are tested and validated. NetApp is the global leader in providing disk storage capacity so it is very important to us to work with Milestone to provide storage systems that meet or exceed both the performance and capacity requirements needed by small systems while also capable of scaling up to easily support the largest of video management systems," said Ted Hayduk, Global Solution Architect for Video Surveillance at NetApp. "The Milestone certification helps document that NetApp and Milestone Systems work closely together to ensure customers that NetApp storage systems will meet their performance and scalability needs."

"Video surveillance is a rapidly growing storage market for HP, requiring storage solutions that can scale, store and mine massive amounts of content cost effectively," said Craig Nunes, Vice President, Marketing, HP Storage. "Milestone's XProtect certification with HP StoreAll Storage with StoreAll Express Query allows our most demanding customers to achieve hyperscale archiving with unparalleled administration analytics."

The Milestone certification results are valid for the lifecycle of the products tested, and there are options for yearly re-certification. This means that when Milestone or the partner launches a new product version, it can be documented that the integration is compatible and optimized.