Milestone Interconnect in comparison to Milestone Federated Architecture

Milestone Interconnect and Milestone Federated Architecture may be seen as two different solutions to the same problem. However, even though they offer the same basic functionality of building a large, centralized VMS consisting of multiple VMS sites, they in fact offer different functionalities, and complement each other in various ways, each with its own specific strengths and use cases.

Milestone Interconnect

With Milestone Interconnect, the connection to the remote sites is made through a dedicated driver in the central XProtect Corporate site’s recording server.

This enables the interconnected site to appear like a kind of video encoder with Edge Storage support, which offers users of the Smart Client the possibility to play back recordings directly from the remote site. Alternatively, if also recording in the central site, it retrieves recordings from the remote sites.

Furthermore, it has the benefit that the recording server handles the connection and authentication on the interconnected sites. This means that cross-domain trust is not needed should the sites be joined to different domains. It also means that the clients do not have to connect and authenticate to multiple sites when logging in. Finally, it is also possible to interconnect remote sites that are not permanently online.

Milestone Federated Architecture

Milestone Federated Architecture allows multiple individual XProtect Corporate and XProtect Expert sites to be interconnected in a parent/child hierarchy of federated sites. Each individual site in the federated hierarchy is a standard XProtect Corporate or XProtect Expert installation, complete with a management server, SQL server, recording server(s), failover server(s), and a number of cameras.

Note: XProtect Expert can only be added as a child in a federated hierarchy.

When the individual sites are added to a federated hierarchy, they appear as one complete VMS installation to administrators and users, while still being as manageable as independent XProtect Corporate or XProtect Expert sites.

The connection between different sites in the federated hierarchy is not a permanent connection but can be seen more like a link to the other sites. In this way, clients that log in on a site that has children will be informed that there are children that it must also connect to and authenticate on.

This means that even though the VMS from the operator’s point of view in the clients appears as one large VMS, the clients authenticate and retrieve the configuration from each site individually. Therefore, Milestone Federated Architecture requires all sites to be online when the clients log in and authenticate. If sites are not online, the clients will experience a longer log-in time because attempts to connect to the unresponsive sites must first time out before login is completed. Furthermore, the client cannot establish a connection automatically to the sites that did not respond during login. The operator in the client must log out and retry to log in manually to get access to the sites that were not responsive.

Finally, as clients always communicate directly with the child sites, and thus receive live and recorded media directly from the child sites, media recorded on the child sites cannot be retrieved or copied from the child sites to the central parent site.

For more information, see the Milestone Federated Architecture whitepaper.