Advocates Economic Benefits of 'Green' NVRs

JH
John Honovich
•Published Feb 01, 2010 00:00 AM
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We question the economic significance of IndigoVision's marketing campaign around 'green' NVRs [link no longer available].

Here's the core of their case:

  • "In a RAID 5 system, typical power consumption for a video storage server and attached RAID disk unit would be 900W, whereas the latest green standalone NVR units typically consume around 50W.'
  • "The storage requirements for a 500 camera system archiving continuous video at 4SIF 25/30fps for 30 days would typically be 300TB. With energy costs at US$0.10 KW/hr, this relates to an annual running cost of: Typical storage server solution: US$10,512 -- Standalone green NVR: US$2,365 And this doesn’t take into account the extra power consumption of the air-conditioning system!"

Let's accept at face value the economic claims (not because we blindly believe them but to simply run the best case scenario for them).

IndigoVision claims $8,000 per year savings across 500 cameras. This works out to $16 per year per camera. Over a 5 year period, this is $80 per camera.

Let's contrast this potential $80 per camera total savings to the cost of their system. Easily an enterprise system using IndigoVision will cost $1,000 or more per camera (given the cost of the cameras, their installation, the servers, storage, etc.)

Assuming the best case vendor assumptions, this results in reducing long term operational costs by 8% of the installed cost. It's close to be a rounding error and since it's based on future savings, it's less valuable than up front expenses.

Making this worse, IndigoVision assumes a 500 camera deployment with maximum frame rate, 4CIF resolution. These type of deployments are statistically quite rare (maybe a few percentage of all deployments). Sites using less cameras and lower recordings settings will achieve even less benefits.

IndigoVision is not the first to make this claim. Ironically, Aimetis made a similar pitch comparing their 'green savings' versus DVRs. read our critique of Aimetis's green claims.