For more than two decades, VMware has been the gold standard for virtualization, and, in turn, the gold standard for the technologies that have grown out of that. Truth be told, the position has been well-earned. VMware has not only been a pioneer in the field, but it has also compiled a vast array of solutions that cater to an organization’s every IT infrastructure need.

Typically, physical security teams that were tasked with making decisions on video surveillance infrastructure solutions did not have an IT background or were making decisions separate from their IT teams. This meant that the complex and labor-intensive solutions from VMware made it difficult for the physical security industry to adopt these technologies. And now, just when the surveillance industry was finally starting to adopt these technologies, Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has furthered the situation.

The Current Situation

There are two requirements physical security teams must have when selecting a video surveillance solution:

• Reliability: Signified by no frames dropped during recording and no video data lost post-recording.
• Simplicity: A platform that security professionals who are not IT savvy can manage on a day-to-day basis.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is now seeing widescale adoption in critical surveillance deployments where reliability is the strongest driving factor. The resiliency and redundancy of HCI systems allow continuous recording for the Video Management System (VMS) application and preservation of the video recording is unparalleled, especially in comparison to traditional Network Video Recorders (NVR).

One core component of such HCI platforms is what is known as the “hypervisor.” It’s this hypervisor that allows an HCI server to host the VMS recording application as well as move it to another server automatically in case of a hardware failure, reducing any downtime or data loss that might be found with a failed NVR server. It also enables multiple applications to run on one HCI system, different than an NVR that requires a separate server (or more) for each application.

Long story short, there are several HCI solutions available in the market, but most of them are built on top of the VMware hypervisor. The VMware technology may be complex, especially for the physical security market, which may or may not have a dedicated IT resource to assist with the implementation and management of it, but because of its capabilities, it was the dominant player in the market.

A New Era for HCI

The IT infrastructure world is abuzz with the ongoing changes post the formalization of the Broadcom acquisition of VMware from Dell. The organizations most affected are medium to small integrators and the non-enterprise segment, like casinos, stadiums, or college campuses. Both of these demographics are an exact overlap for the security industry in general, and the video surveillance market in particular. Let’s try and understand the changes Broadcom is making what that means for the physical security industry:

• Exorbitant Pricing: Base VMware ESXi was free, and the vSphere kit that most HCI solutions used was low cost. Now, the cost has abruptly risen to five times as much aswhat most HCI solution providers were paying VMware a year ago.  This inflation will inevitably factor into the final customer pricing.
• New Subscription Licensing: Gone are the days of the popular perpetual license feature. Now, everyone has to pay for an annual subscription, renewed annually and subject to price changes. The physical security industry often operates on a different financial practice, and their budgets are set up to be one-time and capex intensive, so adjusting to this annual subscription licensing model may prove difficult.
• No Channel Partner Clarity: This is what has caused the most amount of upheaval—the discontinuation of most go-to-market partnerships. Only very select integrators may be invited to their alliance program, and the rest have no option to engage, making it very difficult to support existing deployments.

Life After Acquisition

VMware’s share of the market has been strong. However, it’s not the only choice for a stable, affordable hypervisor in the market. KVM, for one, has long been a hypervisor of choice for many, including AWS, for years.

Companies are now scrambling to piece together an HCI solution based on a different hypervisor, like KVM, to avoid the challenges with VMware. The problem is that when you are trying to build a reliable solution, it takes months, if not years, to fully test and bring a solution to market capable of handling critical data load, like video surveillance.

The Good News

There are solutions on the market, like Quantum’s Unified Surveillance Platform HCI solution, that either leverage other hypervisors or have developed their own hypervisor, eliminating the need to pay a third-party for their technology, and bringing stability and cost savings to channel partners and customers. For security integrators, it’s critical to understand the current situation and the options available when looking to deploy an HCI solution for video surveillance. The good news is Quantum offers better alternatives so you can continue to offer HCI to customers for their mission-critical video workloads.