It gives me the option to choose any of the streams, just can't get any of them to do 1080p except the main one.
5mp, but only records at 720p, wtf good is that lolIt's "cloud managed" so it must be goodonly 720p at those prices.
Looks like it might record a 720p substream to the sd card, not sure... marketing on this one is subpar.
That kind of storage is a bit overkill for most situations. 4x6TB WD Purples is a lot less than $20k.
Oh look my first topic on IPcamTalk that I actually know a little something about
I just learned about Meraki last week at a Cisco event in AZ where I had dinner with their global business development manager. Meraki (which is now Cisco Miraki) cameras are better seen as a subscription model for surveillance costs then a camera purchase. Obviously a 720p h.264 dome cam with like 20m IR doesn't sound amazing at $1500. What they offer is essentially 3 years (I think) of fully "offloaded" management and storage (sort of) plus the camera provided at a rate of $1500 (outdoor model). A couple notes here, Cisco usually has 45-55% margin available just to the partner selling the solution on stuff like this, and this is not aimed at home/private users at all. Meraki targets education, manufacturing, and hospitality primarily where 1-5 IT guys are managing everything from AD, a thousand users, a network, etc, etc so a "plug-n-play" model for cameras can be really appealing, especially when the selling partner can really sell this stuff at $900 a cam or so on a big roll out. For an enterprise to deploy a 20 camera solution, complete with management and storage for about $25k every 3 years they are winning all day long when compared to other enterprise class solutions.
For comparison (granted, not apples to apples):
20 good IP cameras from someone like HikVison would run maybe $5-7k right? Double that if they go with someone higher tier like Vivotek. (you can't take Dahua into consideration here because from an enterprise standpoint they are brand new in the market here, all enterprises care about is support/reputation.
20TB useable capacity from an enterprise storage vendor (like NetApp, Pure, or EMC) would be at a minimum $30k with 3 year support contract. Maybe $20k if you go NetApp E-Series and just get a dumb SAN array. Then you have to back that all up, so another $10k for a Barracuda appliance w/ cloud archive.
Let's assume you're already running a virtualized cluster and don't have to add a physical server, (which would be another $5-10k or so with support) you're still in that solution for way more than Meraki's offering.
All in all, in their market, Meraki is a very affordable solution offering for enterprises that seek to spend on an OpEx model. Similar to their $500 APs, they just don't sell products aimed at homeowner at all. Strictly beeswax products marketed with cute videos.
Something is off...Oh look my first topic on IPcamTalk that I actually know a little something about
I just learned about Meraki last week at a Cisco event in AZ where I had dinner with their global business development manager. Meraki (which is now Cisco Miraki) cameras are better seen as a subscription model for surveillance costs then a camera purchase. Obviously a 720p h.264 dome cam with like 20m IR doesn't sound amazing at $1500. What they offer is essentially 3 years (I think) of fully "offloaded" management and storage (sort of) plus the camera provided at a rate of $1500 (outdoor model). A couple notes here, Cisco usually has 45-55% margin available just to the partner selling the solution on stuff like this, and this is not aimed at home/private users at all. Meraki targets education, manufacturing, and hospitality primarily where 1-5 IT guys are managing everything from AD, a thousand users, a network, etc, etc so a "plug-n-play" model for cameras can be really appealing, especially when the selling partner can really sell this stuff at $900 a cam or so on a big roll out. For an enterprise to deploy a 20 camera solution, complete with management and storage for about $25k every 3 years they are winning all day long when compared to other enterprise class solutions.
For comparison (granted, not apples to apples):
20 good IP cameras from someone like HikVison would run maybe $5-7k right? Double that if they go with someone higher tier like Vivotek. (you can't take Dahua into consideration here because from an enterprise standpoint they are brand new in the market here, all enterprises care about is support/reputation.
20TB useable capacity from an enterprise storage vendor (like NetApp, Pure, or EMC) would be at a minimum $30k with 3 year support contract. Maybe $20k if you go NetApp E-Series and just get a dumb SAN array. Then you have to back that all up, so another $10k for a Barracuda appliance w/ cloud archive.
Let's assume you're already running a virtualized cluster and don't have to add a physical server, (which would be another $5-10k or so with support) you're still in that solution for way more than Meraki's offering.
All in all, in their market, Meraki is a very affordable solution offering for enterprises that seek to spend on an OpEx model. Similar to their $500 APs, they just don't sell products aimed at homeowner at all. Strictly beeswax products marketed with cute videos.
You're spot on. Often it's the IT guys making the 80k who order the $50k equipment
So the cycle lives on.
You are absolutely right, there are a ton of ways to get 20TB hella cheaper than $20k bucks. The idea they pitch and that almost all major IT orgs buy into is to buy a $10k piece of hardware and pay another $10k+ to have it be "support's problem" if something breaks. The hardware won't be 4 stand alone consumer disks with zero FT, it will be something like 14x 2TB Enterprise storage drives in a dynamic disc pool using striping, parity, and distributed hot spares, it will have dual dedicated power supplies, a couple Xeons, and a few dozen gigs of ram, all redundant. Overkill in consumer space for plain-ol-storage sure, but the idea these guys have is to keep their jobs and have 30 minutes or less downtime per year. Of course like hmjgriffon said, it's marked up to the moon and back by the OEM, then the distributor, then the channel partner who sells it, by the time everyone makes their 20-30 points on the deal it's 4-5x what it's actually worth. Such is enterprise IT.
You're spot on. Often it's the IT guys making the 80k who order the $50k equipment
