QNAP NVRs Low-Cost IP Video Examined
by John Honovich, IPVM posted on Nov 22, 2009 About John Contact JohnNetwork attached storage (NAS) manufacturers are rapidly entering the video surveillance market, offering low cost NVRs with advanced storage management compared to traditional video recorders.
Perhaps the most well known of these manufacturers and certainly the most commonly sold on-line is QNAP Security, a division of QNAP systems. QNAP offers a broad selection of NVRs ranging from 4 to 40 channel units.
QNAP and other NAS manufacturer offer an alternative to software only providers (like Milestone, Genetec, OnSSI, etc.) who charge $100 - $300 per channel just for software in addition to the purchase of separate computers to run the software (see our analysis of Intransa's NVR appliances for an attempt to simplify this but at a relatively high price).
While QNAP does not deliver many of the premium and sophisticated features that software only providers supply, QNAP's low cost, broad camera support and sophisticated storage management will be a better fit for a number of applications.
In this premium report, we examined the features, pricing, strengths and weaknesses of QNAP as compared to software only providers as well as NVR appliances from Avermedia, Exacq and NUUO.
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