In The Trenches Video Series

NVRs with Redundant Power (Mission Critical)

In this episode of In the Trenches, SCW’s expert panel discusses the dual / redundant power supply feature of SCW’s enterprise grade NVRs. Redundant power is a feature that exists on many enterprise grade equipment, from mission critical Cisco networking switches to Dell servers and more. Find out how having dual power supplies can protect your system operations while also reducing the burden and stress on your IT staff.

Our speakers today are:

• > James Campbell
• > Ben Larue
• > Matthew Nederlanden
• > Michael Bell

James Campbell:

Again, they're on a slide, so you just simply, if there's a hand screw in there, you unscrew it, slide it out, slide it back in.

Ben LaRue:

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Influencers Roundtable. Today we're doing a product feature focus. Really, we're going to be focusing on talking to the IT audience, those system admin, those network admin folks. We're going to be talking about a mission critical feature, and that's dual power supply. We've got our awesome panel of experts here with us again today. How are we all doing?

Matthew Nederlanden:

Doing great, thanks.

Ben LaRue:

Awesome. Absolutely. And so this is a feature, a product focus episode. So we've got these four sections. We're going to first cover what is dual power supply. We're then going to talk about who should be interested in this type of feature that some of our NVRs have. We'll then talk about the specific NVR models that support this feature. And then finally we will talk about some of the repair implications and we'll dive a little bit in detail what that means exactly. Definitely stay tuned. Stick around for the entire episode, or if you don't have time, go ahead and click down to that section right now. There'll be a little breakdown in the description below. But to get us started, I think without further ado, let's talk about what dual power supply really is.

James Campbell:

Yeah, I mean as the name implies, some of our highest end nvs, our enterprise grade nvs have not just one slot for power supply, but two. And these power, power supplies, excuse me, are both on rails. So they're easy to swap in the event of any unlikely, but obviously very serious issue if your power supply is not working so

Ben LaRue:

Awesome. And why is a dual power supply even an important thing? Why does dual power supply exist on some of these higher end nvs?

Michael Bell:

Well, I think you're, sorry. I think you're looking out for failure of a power supply. So you have one there as a backup. So just in case one goes dead for whatever reason, there's one there that'll just keep on trucking. You're not going to have any blips and footage or anything like that. It's just continuous power.

Matthew Nederlanden:

And the other one is it's just saving your IT teams time. So if you did have that sort of problem, having somebody have to chase that problem for half a day is a lot of lost wages. It's very easy to replace. It's on rails and it's going to continue operating. So it's not like this could be a major problem if you're at a highly secure site where suddenly you lost surveillance footage. In this case you wouldn't do that. You would only lose a singular power supply.

James Campbell:

I think it's important to also point out we have a very low failure rate on these products, but when you think of any electronic, whether it's servers, computers, et cetera, power supply, generat, heat, they have capacitors, they have all these things that have a failure point at some point, whether that's in the first five years for years or whatever, or even way down the line when you're still operating the system the older gets the more likely you have a failure. So having this as an option, we clarified, you plug both of them into a wall. So it's basically in the event that one fails, the system's not going to shut down for even a second. I think that's one of the key points. It's going to keep operating and you can then replace that power supply as you need. You don't necessarily have to rush to go do it, but obviously you want to get up and running as soon as you can, but you can do it on your own schedule instead of having to drop everything and run to fix the security camera system.

Ben LaRue:

Yeah, good understanding of what dual power supply is. Who should be interested in this type of feature?

Matthew Nederlanden:

Really anybody that's going to have a mission critical sense of security. So in other words, very obvious one is going to be a prison. You don't have eyes on the prisoners. This is a tremendously bad situation right now. That's your whole job is to watch the prisoners. And so that's going to be your most obvious, most extreme example for this. But additional examples would be like data centers. They've got a bunch of regulations that require you to make sure that the data is safe and secure. You're dealing with people's intellectual property. Of course you don't want to accidentally give the wrong person access to it and not know what happened down to a whole host of other people manufacturers that deal with dangerous chemicals. Anything where the potential, this is stuff that's even probably deeper than theft. You've got a major liability issue. If you are a manufacturer and you deal with a dangerous chemical that can be turned into let's say a bomb or something, that is a major much bigger concern for the liability for that than it is for in a traditional like hey, somebody might steal my car. Sort of surveillance application. So if you've got something on the line that is much larger than normal, are you a museum that hosts priceless artifacts? You can't get them back. Having these sort of things go down and have something bad happen is far more catastrophic than a small medium business that somebody steals something from that cash.

Michael Bell:

And just to also touch on just for your IT team, the convenience of having it backed up, you pay them a lot of money. So if something happens and they're like, okay, I have a little bit of time where I can figure this out later, and the system's still running, they don't have to like, oh my goodness, what is going on? I have to get this back up as soon as possible. Then you have to wait for shipping and stuff like that. It's just convenient.

Matthew Nederlanden:

Even just the possibility that it dies overnight. Exactly. Do you want to wake up in the middle of the night and go replace this or are you going to say, I'll do that tomorrow. One of those is a security risk if you don't have a backup power supply. And the other one is just I get to sleep in.

Ben LaRue:

And we definitely see this with a lot of our multi-location clients where they have distributed IT teams and they might have an IT team based out of a headquarters and they've got locations across the country who buys you that time to get resources on site to

Matthew Nederlanden:

Where somebody is going to roll a truck, but it's going to roll a truck for hours or days away. Yeah. Another really good example would be anything in the healthcare field. Hospitals in particular have a major problem with their parking lots. It's like the third most unsafe place to be in any sort of community. The first being a prison, the second being police parking lot. So parking lots are where a lot of crime happens and hospitals have pretty big parking lots, pretty big parking garages and this is a thing to not lose your eyes on.

James Campbell:

Yeah, I love that line. I was about to say something like that. If you're relying on the security camera to be your eyes to the facility, another place where you've got a guard or you've got somebody who's relying on that, you don't want any kind of downtime.

Ben LaRue:

Alright, so now that we have an understanding of what dual power play is, who should be interested in this? What model NBRs do we carry that support it?

Michael Bell:

I can take that. That'll be the higher end imperials. So the Imperial 64 16 S, the Imperial 1 28 and the Imperial 2 56 all have that capability

Matthew Nederlanden:

Just so we don't create any confusion. There's an Imperial 64 and Imperial 64 dash 16 s. The one with a more complicated skew has a larger number of hard drives. In addition, it also has this extra,

James Campbell:

I think just to add on to obviously these are getting into, I consider these all mission critical n VR because they have feature sets like this, the dual power supply, but they also have things like the hard drives are on slides themselves. So can, if you need to swap a hard drive, add a hard drive, you can just take off the front, it's right there in front of you. You don't have to open up the entire chassis, you just drop it down. You don't even have to take it out of your rack. There's a lot of features on these ones that I'm sure we could do an entire video on that go into saving time, making it easier to address any issues that these models are very good for. All the reasons we mentioned why you want dual power supply as well. So even though this is focus on that, there's other features there too.

Michael Bell:

Doesn't

Matthew Nederlanden:

Reducing.

Michael Bell:

Go ahead Matt. Sorry.

Matthew Nederlanden:

I was saying it's all about reducing that IT burden. They're just so much easier to manage. There are less man hours that have to be put into something. Redundancies are built in, stuff like that is available in the higher end line because it is expensive.

Michael Bell:

Yes. James, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the mini SaaS, the additional hard drive base that you can add to one of these higher end imperials, doesn't it also have the option for the two power supplies?

James Campbell:

Yeah, absolutely. And again, we could go into it, but there's even features like that feature.

Ben LaRue:

There's so many features, you don't know the names of it, so many features. Example

Matthew Nederlanden:

Expert panel,

James Campbell:

So it's called Hots Spare. Yeah, so it even supports a piece called Hots Spare that allows, basically you have an NVR that's waiting in the event of any kind of disconnection between the system, whether that's network related or hardware related or anything like that, that it can actually take over. So again, limiting your downtime to basically zero. So a bunch of features on these ones that I'm excited to go start talking about more in depth as we go through the series.

Ben LaRue:

Definitely, definitely. Yeah. We'll probably have episodes for upon all these different features themselves. But this is like James said at the beginning, a mission critical line of MBRs. This is for those clients who have regulatory requirements or code is mission critical, can't have any downtime. So let's move on to section four, repair implications. So there's a dual power supply and we acknowledge that power supply sometimes are the components of these systems that could fail if they do fail. What is the repair process or what are some implications that we might need to consider now that we've got dual power supply?

James Campbell:

I think it depends a little bit on how you purchase the system. Of course if you're install, you have a totally different set of procedures for replacements and everything like that. But if you're somebody you purchased and you installed it yourself, if you have a power supply that fails, there's a situation where you have kind of an option. We could send you a power supply for the regular nvs, but that does require a little bit of both expertise and time to get that installed. And you're either going to be short of one or the other in a lot of cases for some of these businesses. And so you have to go in, take it out of the rack, open the casing, replace the power supply, put the new one in, take the other one out I should say. So it takes a decent amount of time and a decent amount of expertise just like you have to know how to build a computer essentially to replace it.

Whereas with the mission critical ones that we just mentioned, again, they're on a slide. So you just simply, if there's a hand screw in there, you unscrew it, slide it out, slide it back in and you're back up and running. So that's really important because, and Michael, you can speak to this, you want to be able to retain that NDR because your footage is on those hard drives, your software's on there, all your settings and stuff like that. So if your power supply fails, it's very difficult to get that setting again. So you don't want to necessarily have to go and reset up your system from scratch and you want the lowest risk potential of losing footage as well. So in the event that you have to replace a unit completely, there's a much higher chance of you having to lose potential footage in some term of failure than it would be if we just have to replace the power spl. So this just makes it significantly easier to make sure that your system's obviously still running, but it's a lot easier to replace in this situation too.

Michael Bell:

And just to go a little bit deeper on that, I mean these larger systems, they have four different nicks on the back. So the one goes to your network for everybody to use for viewing and stuff like that, but then you have three other nicks that go out to your cameras if you didn't back up your configuration file and have those available to re-upload to a new system if it has to be replaced. Oh my goodness, that is, that's a bad day. Number one, you've lost everything. Number two, you have to reset it up and that could take hours. So just having this able to just swap those power supplies out is amazing.

Ben LaRue:

And if you need to set up your config to back up, please contact our report down below and the contact information, you'll be happy to set that up for you. No, but seriously, even it being on rails like you called out earlier might mean the IT person, could you schedule the maintenance person to do it, right? If there's clear instructions,

James Campbell:

Anybody can do that. This is one of the easiest things you can do hardware wise. Again, I'll put a video here, it's a screw. Put it in, you're good to go. It's super simple. Anybody can do it. So that's an excellent point. It doesn't even have to be the IT person doing this or dealing with it potentially if that's not required or necessary, depending on the access and everything.

Ben LaRue:

Any other implications that we might have in terms of repair or just in general when we're thinking about dual power supplies?

James Campbell:

Yeah, I think Michael brought it up before we were talking here just about UPSs and backup batteries and everything like that. That's another factor you want to definitely look into if you haven't already, but there's probably another video for that in itself.

Michael Bell:

I have a question. What about bringing in your power from two different sources? Like two different, if you had a breaker trip and that entire breaker went down, maybe you didn't have AUPS, maybe you had another breaker that the other power supply was running on. I'm not super familiar with power, but that does seem like a good idea to me.

James Campbell:

You could, yeah, definitely. Just depending on the level of effort and time and money you want to put into redundancy, you could certainly do something like that. It might depend on your building, how solid is the power in that building? How old is that building? The more the older it is, the more likely you have more power issues.

Matthew Nederlanden:

And how far away is a plug that's connected to a different breaker? That's probably going to be your most limiting factor there. Where would I have to go to do that? But obviously you can put in two different plugs or two different breakers at your server closet and a lot of larger server closets have that just from power consumption. So you might have a couple different breakers there. But yeah, you should still use a battery backup on one of those.

Ben LaRue:

Anything else on Google Power Supply?

James Campbell:

No, I feel pretty good. Yeah,

Ben LaRue:

Thank you. Really neat feature on our higher end enterprise grade and vr, so be sure to check out the link below to those units in the description. Thanks again so much for joining us Panel of Experts. Really appreciate it. Thanks for tuning into this episode. Make sure to tune in next week for another fun one. If you have any topics you want to have us cover, make sure to drop in the comment below. Until next time though, thanks y'all.

All:

Bye.