Milestone's matrix (https://www.milestonesys.com/solutions/platform/product-index/) offers Corporate edition with "central management, distributed sites". Does that mean subnetted VMS servers can be distributed across a corporate/campus network? Or does that mean just the cameras can be distributed to different off-sites? I couldn't exactly determine that from Milestone's website.
Your earliest response is appreciated as I will be entertaining discussion shortly.
As much as I am aware, both are possible. I've never deployed it, but it is my understanding that you could have Recorders on different subnets talking to a primary server, and cameras across different sites distributed across servers on different subnets. This is a pretty common architecture at this level of Enterprise VMS software.
Hi Alan,
The "distributed sites" portion has to do with XProtect Corporate supporting Milestone Federated Architecture (MFA) and Milestone Inteconnect. The links will take you to white papers on both of them.
MFA requires a Corporate head-end to act as the Parent and then the children can either be Corporate or Expert. The MFA functionality allows you to have multiple Corporate/Expert installations (each with its own Management Server, SQL Server, Event Server, and Recording Servers) tied together so that users can log into the Parent and, based on their permissions, also see cameras and receive alarms from the Child sites. Basically, behind the scenes the Smart Client is logging into all of the child sites as well. It also provides some, but not all, unified management across those sites.
Milestone Interconnect also requires a Corporate head-end but the child/remote sites can be any paid version of Milestone software. The remote sites add as a piece of hardware into a Recording Server on the Corporate head-end and essentially look like a multi-channel encoder. Some key differences between MFA and Interconnect are:
- With Interconnect, the client only logs into the Corporate head-end system. It doesn't log into the remote sites behind the scenes because those remote sites are connect as a piece of hardware to a Recording Server on the Corporate head-end system.
- Video can be recorded at the remote site like normal but it could also be recorded at the Corporate head-end site since the remote site is just seen as another piece of hardware.
- Expanding on the previous feature, you could record at the remote site and then, on a schedule or event, use our edge retrieval functionality (same functionality for utilizing edge storage on cameras), to retrieve the video from the remote site and store it in the Corporate head-end site. This is useful for transportation customers. They can have a full system on a bus. When the bus comes back at the end of the day, it dumps all of its video to the head-end system. That way, if video needs to be reviewed, they don't need a network connection to the bus (since most cities don't have city-wide WiFi so their either isn't any network connection to buses or they connect over cellular and pay per bandwidth used which can be expensive with video).
There are other differences as well that are covered in the white papers linked to above.
As for your question regarding subnetted VMS servers distributed across a corporate/campus network or cameras being distributed to different off-sites, all of our software supports both of those aspects. We are not limited to only working within the same subnet.
Let me know if there are further questions.
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