The top technology trend for Spring 2012 is edge storage, as selected by your fellow IPVM readers. While edge storage has slowly evolved it had never made a big push to the 'core' of the video surveillance market. Now, with a major boost by Axis plus new support from Exacq and Aimetis joining existing offerings from Genetec and Milestone, broader acceptance is increasing.

Potential for edge storage is clearly there:

• Traditional centralized recorders could be replaced by SD cards inside cameras.
• Cameras with low bandwidth or poor relaibility network connections can make use of edge storage. A good example is wide area wireless systems.
• Locations where only a few cameras are needed yet struggle to justify the cost of a full recorder can use edge storage.
• SD cards can be used for redundancy in case the recorder or network fails.

How Well Does it Work?

Since the technology is not broadly used, questions remain about how well it will work and how suitable it will be for traditional recorder replacement. Indeed our test results and many integrators experience with Mobotix's edge storage implementation, show that edge storage can introduce usability problems and delay in video retrieval.

Tests

Inside this report, we share out test results of Axis Camera Companion and Exacq Edge to better understand the performance, usability and application of these two new edge offerings.