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Built-in high availability & load balancing with Security Center 5.1

There are multiple ways to protect a system against hardware or software failure.  It usually starts with basic concepts like using RAID configuration for hard disk drives, redundant power supply or UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply), or redundant network connection.  However, these protection mechanisms only protect a portion of the entire system.  The application layer and the data it manages also need to be protected.  This is typically done using solutions provided by the manufacturer. 

Some manufacturers will strictly rely on OTS (Off-The-Shelf) high availability solutions offered on the market such as Microsoft Clustering Services or VMware HA while other will also offer built-in high availability solutions tailored for their platform.

The main differences between OTS solutions versus built-in solutions are typically the level of protection you get and the rapidity at which the failover happens.  OTS solutions will generally protect the system against hardware failure only, i.e. if the main server hardware fails a standby server can start to resume the operations.  On the other hand, if the application or the OS fails, an OTS solution will not automatically provoke the failover.  The other difference is the time it takes for the standby server to resume the operations.  With an OTS solution, in addition to starting the standby server, the application services and sometime to OS need to be started.  This may take some time and this is certainly not the desire comportment when the system is down.  With built-in high availability solutions, it is possible to protect the system at the application level and also substantially reduce the failover time because the standby server can already be started and ready to take over the operations.

Genetec proposes an extensive set of protection mechanisms in order to keep the system and its data accessible all times.  The built-in high availability, failover and load balancing options available with Security Center helps protect the system against hardware, network, storage, database, OS and application failure.  Security Center also supports OTS solutions as this is sometimes an IT requirement.  Below is the list of the different options available in Security Center to protect access to the system and the data it manages.

System Availability

  • Failover Directory
  • Load Balancing
  • Uninterrupted video streaming

Data Availability

  • Failover and Redundant Archiving
  • Auxiliary Archiving
  • Video Trickling and Edge Recording

Off-The-Shelf Solutions

  • Microsoft Clustering Services
  • NEC ExpressCluster
  • VMware 

For more information about our different protection mechanisms, please read our feature focus on high availability on our website.