An increase in video data and analytics usage puts a strain on traditional storage solutions. A tiered approach moves data to different 'tiers' of storage, allowing users to share and retrieve data more effectively.
With more and more high-resolution cameras in projects such as city surveillance, the storage of the overwhelming amounts of data becomes a major challenge for end users seeking to share and retrieve this data quickly. For example, in a project with 1,000 cameras, each with an average throughput of 2Mbps, and requirements that the video be kept 30 days, that’s a total required capacity of 648TB and throughput of up to 250MB per second.
Further complicating the issue is the increasing use of analytics, which will further strain the storage system. Take assisted video search, for example. Filters that prove efficient to detect certain types of situations may be used to filter out sequences of interest in large video archives. The filter is processed by the NVR in charge of managing the recorded video feed and requires high computing power.
The combination of these factors has highlighted some of the limitations in traditional storage solutions. “NVR architectures suffer many limitations, either in disk or in processing capacity,” said Quantum in its recent whitepaper titled “Intelligent Storage Enables Next-Generation Surveillance and Security Infrastructure.” “The necessary storage volumes keep growing as video resolution increases. 1K, 4K and 8K megapixel cameras require such gigantic storage space that network video recorders can hardly handle more than a handful of them simultaneously.”
What Quantum offers, called StorNext, is a tiered storage solution that moves data to different “tiers” of storage including high-performance disk, high-capacity disk, file-based tape, and cloud-based storage.
“Users demand the best trade-off between budget and mission whilst minimizing sacrifice of redundancy, accessibility or scalability,” Quantum said. “By using a tiered storage approach, end users will spend less of their overall budget on storage, allowing security professionals to spend more on other surveillance tools they need.”
The solution still employs a primary storage with capacity ranging from 230.4TB to 1.44PB. Then, the system scales itself out to secondary “tiers” to offer extra value for users. These tiers include:
Tape archives: When attached to the primary storage, the tape archives provide a tier of scalable storage. “The tape archive is the most cost-effective capacity tier for archiving video. With file based tape, you can store massive amounts of video over longer periods of retention,” the whitepaper said. “To scale a tape storage environment’s capacity, you can simply add more tape cartridges, or additional drives can be provisioned to accommodate increased ingest or data retrieval.”
Cloud archive: The cloud archive provides access to a virtually limitless pool of off-premise storage through StorNext 5 data management software. “Just set your policies based on your business requirements and StorNext automatically copies or moves data to highly reliable, always-available cloud storage, with no scripts, programming, or manual processes,” the company said. “Use it for enhanced data protection, on-the-fly scalability, or to offload content from primary storage. The choice is yours.”