AXIS Camera Station With Wasabi Surveillance Cloud

How do I use AXIS Camera Station with Wasabi Surveillance Cloud?

AXIS Camera Station is validated for use with Wasabi Surveillance Cloud. AXIS Camera Station is a video and access management software developed to fit surveillance use cases.

1. Prerequisites

• AXIS Camera Station 5, AXIS S-Series Server (or 3rd party server that meets guidelines)

• Active Wasabi Cloud Storage Account

• Wasabi Bucket - See our Bucket Creation Guide

• Access & Secret Key Pair - See our Access Keys Guide

2. Wasabi Surveillance Cloud Installation

For activation and installation of Wasabi Surveillance Cloud software instructions, please refer to this Knowledge Base article.

Upon installing Wasabi Surveillance Cloud you will need to edit a registry key to virtually extend the volume size of your recording volume so that ACS recognizes the overall size requirement.

1. One Windows registry editor (type "regedit" in Start Menu, Run or CMD)

2. Navigate to Computer\HKEY_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\tierflt

3. Create a REG_DWORD and name it "VirtualExtensionSize"

4. Modify the newly created DWORD and change its value to the desired volume size in GB (decimal). For example, putting "500" would extend the volume to 500 GB. Of course, this is only a virtual extension and not a real one. In reality, the volume will retain its original size, but Windows will report it as 500 GB to any application that may want to access it.

5. Restart the machine so the changes can take effect. If you want to avoid restarting the machine, you can run the following command lines in an administrative CMD:

net stop tiersvc

net stop tierflt

net start tierflt

net start tiersvc

These command lines will restart WSC's main service as well as the tiering filter driver in the correct order.

Your registry entry should look like the following

3. Configuration

A. AXIS Camera Station

1. Install, configure and activate your AXIS Camera product.

2. After creating a bucket on Wasabi, go to your AXIS Camera Station client and look for the main recording drives by navigating to configuration>management. Here you can adjust allocated capacity.

3. Under configuration>selection make sure the cameras you wish to store in the cloud are storing the drive you wish to replicate. 

B. Wasabi Surveillance Cloud

1. Launch the Wasabi Surveillance Cloud app

2. Using the Add Source button, select the same drive/folder as shown in AXIS Camera Station as the source to be replicated.

3. Click on the down arrow next to Targets and select the existing 'Wasabi' profile, to auto fill the access and secret keys. You can optionally enter the keys manually.

4. Select the appropriate region in which you want to store the video recordings.

5. Click on Create Bucket to create a new bucket in your WSC account. Use the bucket naming conventions specified here. Click OK when done.

6. Click Apply to apply the configuration changes.

At this point, the Surveillance Cloud software is setup to begin replicating all the data in the source folder to the Wasabi bucket. After all configurations steps have been performed, click the “Resume” button (first click on Wasabi Surveillance Cloud at the top left) to start the service. Replication of data to the cloud will commence immediately.

You can login to the Wasabi console and confirm if the data is being written to the bucket with the same directory structure as seen on the local storage.

4. Additional Configuration Information

Disaster Recovery Policy
Mirror Copies the customer data to the cloud. Both data sets are identical (the one on-prem, and one in the cloud) Bridge makes a full copy of local data to the cloud for redundancy.

Storage Extension Settings
In this case, Instead of a mirror copy, you're simply extending the capability of local storage to the cloud. The older data is in the cloud, while the newest data sits locally. After X number of days, the data is deleted from the local drive to free up on-prem capacity, but data is still in the cloud if/when it needs to be accessed.

Disaster Recovery + Storage Extension
By combining both options, as soon as the data lands on disk, it replicates to the cloud. Data is only deleted from the local drive when it hits the retention (perhaps 7th day, whatever the customer requires), then it's off the local drive but you can still retrieve it instantly from the cloud