Perspective
Ted designs storage from retention requirements backward. The right question is “how many days of footage must survive under worst-case motion, and what happens when a drive fails on day 29?” — not “how much raw capacity can we afford?”
His retention math accounts for camera count, codec, bitrate, frame rate, motion density, and the redundancy the customer actually wants (not what they wrote in the RFP). He prioritizes write reliability, redundancy, and predictable performance over raw capacity, and he’s known for catching undersized designs early — before the customer hits day 14 and realizes their NVR can’t keep up.
Approach
He prefers purpose-built video storage platforms or rigorously validated server configurations, and stays cautious with generic IT storage when the workload is 24/7 sequential writes with occasional high-priority reads.
