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David Brent is a technical information engineer for IT systems at Bosch Security Systems, Inc.

"I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern ship building has gone beyond that."
- Captain Smith, Commander of the Titanic

This quotation is a foreshadowing that not only applies to ships at sea, but also to networks of any size. The iceberg that may lurk in your future is CCTV video, if it is treated like regular data. Video is a unique creature with nuances of its own, and those can be very mercurial based on the implementation and specific deployment.

In the mid-1990s, the CCTV industry slowly started its digital convergence with the IT industry, and the merger has now reached staggering speed -- outpacing the knowledge base of most CCTV integrators, installers and contractors. Most integrators will not pay IT industry salaries to their field technicians, preventing qualified IT techs from entering the security industry. That, coupled with the fact that IT now has the biggest say about the products being deployed on their networks, results in more IT departments taking ownership of their CCTV security systems.

About a decade ago, when I found my way into the security industry, I was an anomaly -- the computer "geek" in the analog CCTV world. Moving from my role as a network administrator in the Marine Corps to a CCTV technical instructor was truly a culture shock. My previous world was about data flow (speed), data security, and long-term storage. The CCTV world is based on the same data principles, but the two types of data were and still are very different in terms of sheer size and volume.

Simple Math
The industry then, as well as some vendors' perspectives now, is to treat video data like any other type of data and store it in a centralized fashion. ("Captain Smith, I think we should turn SOUTH just a bit!")

In most of my seminars and presentations, I usually equate video and data to ice. Data is like a cup of ice cubes, while video on a large system is the iceberg that sank the Titanic. Let's do a simple comparison to show you what I mean.

For a point-of-sale transaction database with 100 million records, you would need roughly 80GB of space, depending on the vendor application and the type of database used. Since a transaction is a change to the database (add, change, delete), theoretically, we could run trillions of transactions against that same 80GB database. So, the first set of numbers for our comparison exercise is: