At any level of government, surveillance is crucial. Whether trying to prevent theft, vandalism, or other public disturbances having clear high-resolution footage is vital. Do you remember the days of the poor-quality analog surveillance footage on the evening news? If so, you know you could barely distinguish between a man and a pole. But technology has vastly improved over the last few decades in both quality and convenience and now we can see more clear surveillance footage.

However, as a result of those improvements, government offices, like Elk Grove Parks Municipality, need a lot more storage to keep all that data. Not to mention, some organizations now require data to be stored for longer durations.

With all of the stipulations placed on administrators, finding the right storage solution very difficult. That's why Ryan Nichol, the system and network administrator for the Elk Grove Parks Municipality, turned to 45Drives when he needed a comprehensive and inexpensive solution to store the municipalities video recordings.

Elk Grove Parks' Storage Pain

When Ryan contacted 45Drives, Elk Grove Park municipality was running out of storage. They didn't have a large storage solution in place for their video surveillance footage and were using very old equipment. Their setup included eight buildings, each with its own camera linked to a DVR. Each DVR had anywhere from 2 to 4 TB of storage and they were only able to record about a month of footage. Also, repairing the old DVRs [and there were multiple of them] wasn't an easy task. If a part broke, Ryan had to find it on eBay or Amazon.

When making purchasing decisions for a county or municipality purchasers often find themselves facing strict budgetary constraints. When Ryan was tasked with a new security camera project he knew he needed a larger storage solution that would fit within his budget. After looking into companies like EMC, HP, and Lenovo, which all offered great things - Ryan wasn't sold on the price and had a few concerns. He was worried about having no control over his storage solution if he wanted to add drives or modify down the road.

Ryan had heard of the Storinator through our friends at Linus Tech Tips and decided it had everything he was looking for - a reliable, massive, affordable storage solution that offered incredible flexibility and it was open source. Ryan chose the S45 for his surveillance project and couldn't be happier.

Would I recommend the Storinator? Yes, I would say buy it. The Storinator will fill any organization's storage requirements.

Note: We recommend S45 Turbo & XL60 Turbo Storinator storage servers for video surveillance and law enforcement.

The Set-Up

Elk Grove Park uses a Storinator S45 populated with 254 TB with plans to expand 80TB more. Because the Storinator is software agnostic - Elk Grove Parks' setup is a little different. Ryan uses multiple sized hard drives in their Storinator and runs software called StableBit DrivePool.

I use this software for many reasons, easy to use, easy to add hard drives, can add any size of hard drive, SSD Optimizer (optimize the use of your pool by using SSD disks as a buffer for new files. Also optionally fills up your pooled disks in a predefined order.), easy UI, support is great, and the price is good.

Their Storinator functions as a network video recorder (NVR) and stores all their surveillance data obtained from cameras across every one of their municipality buildings. Elk Grove Parks' Storinator has its own network parallel to the main business network - so they can keep the cameras on a different network. For this reason, they configured the Storinator with a fiber network card. The data is recorded on site and then sent to the Storinator. They store live data with up to 25 people accessing it.

The Storinator is great; we have multiple people accessing it and the performance has been great.

45 Drives Support

Before purchasing the Storinator, Ryan wanted to make sure he was making the right decision and asked our support team about some of his concerns. The 45 Drives Technical Support Team supplied Ryan with all the information he needed to make an informed decision about his solution.

One of Ryan's favourite applications of the Storinator was how easy it is to replace a failed drive. He was able to rapidly replace a failed drive with easily available consumer drives - rather than having to order a specific drive required by other server suppliers.

The Storinator has made it super easy to replace drives that fail. I can just order them off Amazon and have them next day while not having to worry about ordering a special drive - it's a great feeling.

Looking to the future

With their 45 Drives Storinator, Elk Grove Park is able to store years of HD footage, and have fast access to their storage from one centralized location all at an extremely affordable price.

Like many other organizations, Elk Grove Park plans to expand their surveillance to contain body and dash cameras for the police department in the near future. They are extremely happy with their Storinator and are looking at expanding their storage with two more - very soon.

...It's one of the best things I have pushed for working for Elk Grove Park Municipality.