WestPoint · Networks · Cisco
Cisco is not the cheapest network. It is the one already there.
In most of the large companies we work with, the client's network is already Cisco and their IT team has had it for years. That changes the video project more than any feature of the switch.
What kind of manufacturer it is, and how you recognise it.
Cisco — Switching, routing and network security in large organisations. And in practice that means the following.
Cisco puts two things above price: that the equipment behaves the same in ten years' time as it does today, and that there are plenty of people in the market who know how to configure it. The second sounds like marketing and is worth the most: when a switch dies on a Friday, what fixes the fault is having somebody to hand who understands that command line.
What it gives up is price and speed on day one. An equivalent switch from another house costs a fraction and is configured in an afternoon from a browser; the Cisco one comes with a way of working, a licence model and documentation you have to read. In exchange, what is documented and tested holds up, and the manufacturer's support answers with an open case and a number.
You recognise it in the house vocabulary. Where there is Cisco there are naming rules, there are configuration templates, there is an established way of bringing up a port and there is somebody who knows what changed last week. That order does not come from the device: it comes from the team running it, and Cisco is the brand around which most such teams have been trained.
How it is administered.
This separates one brand from another far more than the specifications do, and with Cisco the answer is clear: by text.
The configuration is a text file written at a command line. It sounds old-fashioned and it is the best operational advantage it has: a text file can be compared with last week's, can be kept in a repository, can be reviewed before being applied and can be sent identically to forty cabinets. Anyone who has chased a change made by hand in a web panel knows what that is worth.
Where it fits well in a security installation.
At the centre of the network and on the big path: the main cabinet, the links between buildings, the stretch through which the traffic of every camera passes towards the recorders. There you pay for real capacity, for queues that stand up to bursts of traffic and for two units that behave as one so that one going down is not the network going down.
At the access layer, where the cameras are plugged in, it fits when the installation is large and mixed: hundreds of points, several storeys, people plugging in there too and a security policy that requires every device to identify itself before entering the network. Cisco has had that solved for a long time and the client's team already has it set up for their computers.
Where we would not put it.
Nobody has all the good answers, and this brand does not either.
In an installation of twenty cameras, one building and nobody from IT inside. It would work perfectly and it would be a mistake: you pay for the equipment, you pay for the subscription, you use a tenth of what it does, and the day something has to be changed there will be nobody in that company able to touch it without making a call. A network only the integrator can maintain is a dependency, not a guarantee.
What really decides things in a video project.
Five things. None of them appears on the first page of the datasheet.
- The power it can really give. A switch «with PoE on every port» has a total number of watts to share out, and that total is set by the power supply it carries inside, not by the number of ports. Twenty-four outdoor cameras with heaters all asking at once on a freezing night exceed the budget of almost any twenty-four-port switch, and when it is exceeded the unit does not warn you: it leaves the last ports without power, and those are usually the ones somebody added later. And there is a detail that is paid for twice: the power is RESERVED by declared class, not by real consumption, so a camera that asks for thirty watts and uses nine takes up thirty in the switch's accounts.
- Where the path narrows. An access switch with twenty-four gigabit ports and a single gigabit link to the main cabinet can take in far more than it can send out. With computers you do not notice, because nobody works all at the same time; with cameras you do, because they all send all the time and all in the same direction. The uplink is sized by the real sum of the worst part of the day, and margin is left for the cameras that are going to arrive.
- The queues, which is the detail that tells a good switch from one that only looks it. Video is a constant flow seen from a distance and a series of bursts seen close up: each complete frame is a burst of packets at full speed. If the bursts of twenty cameras coincide, a switch with little packet memory discards — and a discarded video packet is not asked for again, it becomes a broken piece of image. Priority helps to choose who gets left out, but it does not create capacity, and it does nothing if nobody has configured the queues and the switch does not believe the markings coming from the cameras.
- What happens when a link goes down, and how long it takes to recover. The network can rebuild itself in milliseconds, in seconds or in half a minute depending on how the path is closed, and the difference matters more than it seems: even if the network comes back in five seconds, each camera's connection with the recorder has been cut, and the recorder takes its time to reconnect them all. Five seconds of network can be a minute of lost recording across two hundred cameras. That is measured by cutting the cable at commissioning and writing down the time, not by reading it in a brochure.
Licences and subscriptions, and what happens when they expire.
Here the answer is reassuring, and it is worth knowing because it is not the same with every brand.
The important thing: when a subscription expires, the switch does not switch off. It carries on switching and carries on giving power to the cameras. What you lose is the right to the higher-tier functions, to the updates and to the support, and that shows up the day a security flaw appears that has to be patched and nobody has access to the corrected version.
Who administers it when we leave.
In networks this question almost always has the same answer, and it is a good one: the client's IT team.
If there is Cisco, there are people who know Cisco. The normal and healthy thing is for the network to carry on being run by the client's IT team, because the camera network is a piece of THEIR network and not a separate system that happened to pass by. We are not here to keep the switch password.
The boundary is this: from the camera to the port, the power, the separation of traffic and the throughput that has to be guaranteed, us. From the port inwards into the corporate network, them. And what gets negotiated in a half-hour meeting is the contract between the two sides: which VLAN, how many watts, how much sustained traffic, what can talk to what, and who tells whom before touching a link. In writing, because in a year's time neither of the two people who agreed it will be there.
And a matter of tone, which is what stalls the most projects: turning up at an IT department that already has its brand, its rules and its way of working and telling them which one they have to buy is three months lost. We adapt to the network that is there. When it genuinely does not stretch — because the power does not reach, because the path narrows or because putting two hundred cameras in there is a security risk — it is explained with the sums done and in writing, before signing. It is not argued with opinions: it is argued with numbers.
What we do not promise.
And we have no contractual relationship with the manufacturer to tell you about. What we can demonstrate is something else: that we know what happens to that network when two hundred cameras run over it, and that is checked in the first technical meeting.
Where to go next.
If what you are deciding is bigger than the brand — how much traffic, what separation, what happens if a cable is cut — that is in the area.
Get started
Is your network already Cisco and now the cameras are arriving?
Tell us how many cameras there are, of what type, in how many cabinets and which switches are fitted. The first thing we will do is the traffic and power sums, and with that we will tell you whether your network holds up or what has to be reinforced. If it holds up, we tell you that too.