Appendix F – Surveillance Bridge from Tiger Surveillance

One of the storage types available in AWS ecosystem is S3. S3 is an object type storage. It does not directly  have the file system structure available in file systems like Windows NTFS.

Therefore it cannot be directly used by Milestone XProtect VMS as XProtect expects to write to a file system.

Third party software can be used to facilitiate this and provide a workaround by mapping a file system to S3 storage.

Surveillance Bridge from Tiger Surveillance is an option.

Please note that this software requires its own license from Tiger Surveillance. And all the support and help regarding using this software should be sent to Tiger Surveillance directly.

The optional plug-in Surveillance Bridge allows for the extension of EBS storage to S3, resulting in significant cost savings and increased durability of recordings. This feature enables users to leverage the benefits of S3 storage while seamlessly integrating it with their existing Milestone XProtect setup. For long-term retention periods, the plug-in also supports all low-cost S3 Glacier Storage Classes.

You can download Tiger Surveillance information from Milestone Marketplace.

About Tiger Surveillance

Tiger Surveillance is a software company specializing in seamless data management and data protection for video surveillance. The company is powered by Tiger Technology, an established technology provider of storage, data, user, and media management solutions. The Tiger Surveillance portfolio includes easy-to-deploy software products designed to manage and safeguard surveillance data both on-prem and with any cloud provider.

About Surveillance Bridge for XProtect

Surveillance Bridge is a software-only solution enabling XProtect to utilize S3 low-cost storage classes. For long-term retention periods, data is automatically transitioned to any S3 Glacier tier while maintaining direct access. Organizations can now meet compliance requirements by seamlessly extending data to S3 storage, providing the fastest possible disaster recovery while ensuring the highest data durability.

Enablement of S3 storage

The best way to get started with using S3 storage is through the CloudFormation template that Milestone provides. Milestone provides option to automatically install Surveillance Bridge during the initialization process.

In order to use, you need to refer to Surveillance Bridge user manuals.

You will need two EBS storages, one for Windows and XProtect installations, another one for video data storage. You will not need to use Archiving function of XProtect. Instead for the EBS storage where the media database will be located, Surveillance Bridge will move the files to S3 or other storage classes based on configuration in the Surveillance Bridge software.

EBS storage for media database needs to be as large as 2-12 hours of media. Please use our calculator in order to dimension properly and calculate the costs. This EBS storage will act as a cache. You need to configure the Surveillance Bridge plugin.

While video data is saved continuously on this EBS storage, in the background it will be moved to S3 storage as configured in the plugin configuration page in Management Client.

If part of video data is requested by XProtect that is not currently in the cache EBS storage, it will be fetched by background service and provided.

It is possible to configure the plugin in such a way that after video data is moved from EBS storage to S3, it gets moved to other storage classes (Glacier, …).

Please refer to Surveillance Bridge user manual for instructions on how to configure the plugin correctly.