As security solutions become more complex, optimized storage systems become a neccessity. To this end, storage solution providers are going all out to meet the demands, tailoring their products to the fast-changing unique requirements of the security market.
Asia in particular is expected to see a huge demand for security solutions in the immediate future, as the region’s emerging economies take rapid strides towards development through initiatives like smart and safe cities. a&s recently caught up with Jim Simon, Senior Director of Marketing in Asia Pacific at Quantum to discuss his company’s plans for Asia.
Jim Simon, Senior Director,
Marketing, Asia Pacific, Quantum
a&s:How does Quantum see the growing potential of Asian security market?
Simon: Asia is the largest market for surveillance storage. Taiwan, in particular, is forecasted to grow at a double digit rate in the next few years.
The need for surveillance storage is being driven by a market transformation. Camera technology is changing with a pronounced shift toward cameras that have higher resolutions and multi-sensors. There is even a trend toward moving more processing to the camera itself.
While cameras are changing, so are retention times. Litigation and judicial requirements call for retention times that can span decades.
Finally, analytics help organizations reduce costs and unlock the business value of their data.
Given the surveillance industry transformation, it is no surprise that the top two vertical markets for surveillance storage are airports and city surveillance. However, there are also tremendous opportunities in education, ports, railways, retail, and casinos, to name just a few.
a&s: How much does Quantum focus on development in Asia?
Simon: Because Asia is the largest surveillance storage market in the world, Quantum is devoting substantial resources to developing our presence. We have invested in marketing and sales and are have achieved certification with a number of technical alliance partners in the camera and VMS fields.
Quantum’s investment has attracted a number of SIs and resellers who have heard about Quantum’s unique value in what we term “intelligent storage.” It’s our ability to provide a surveillance-specific, intelligent, scalable storage platform that is is simple to manage and can grow under a single file system as our customers’ needs grow. Unlike IT-centric solutions with their expense and data management complexity, Quantum’s isolated surveillance appliances and tiered storage platform provide a total usable capacity for less of the overall budget. This, in turn, allows security professionals to invest more in other tools to successfully accomplish their mission of keeping people and property safe.
SIs quickly recognize that by designing in Quantum surveillance storage they can prevent their customers from needing to make compromises in other areas like cameras, retention time, and analytics.
a&s: What problems or challenges do you see in storage solutions for security solutions?
Simon: The main problems that Quantum identified and addressed have been the high cost and complexity of applying IT-centric solutions to video surveillance. Quantum’s intelligent tiered storage platform provides a total usable capacity for less of the overall budget while still managing to out-perform legacy systems.
a&s:What solutions can Quantum provide for the smart/safe city initiatives in Asia?
Simon: The Smart/safe cities initiative incorporates more cameras, higher resolutions, and longer retention times. These factors cause a tremendous increase in the need for storage—sometimes exceeding more than half of the budget of their initiatives.
Quantum provides a high-performance infrastructure that can handle increased resolutions, camera and sensor counts, and real-time analytics. When this performance is combined with our intelligent, scalable solution that leverages policy-based tiering we help cities reduce their overall spend on storage. Finally, we help customers manage for performance, capacity, and cost all within a single platform. File access is as easy as a single c: drive. Ultimately, cities are able to retain more of their budget for investments in cameras, retention, and analytics.
a&s: Storage technology is increasingly sophisticated. In Quantum’s point of view, what’s in store for storage technology in the future?
Simon: Intelligent storage is the way of the future. This means having the ability to automatically tier data over time from one type of storage to another, based on the organization’s customized policy. Tiering empowers the movement of less-frequently used data to the most cost-effective storage with best-in-class data integrity. Being able to deploy and properly size both performance and capacity tiers creates a balanced infrastructure. For example, the costlier, high performance tier can be sized as small as possible, while investing in capacity needed across less costly tiers such as object-based storage or file-based tape, thus delivering the total capacity needed more cost effectively.
Illustrating this with an example, a major US city expects to spend US$1.3 million for a year of cloud-based storage for its law enforcement officers. At the end of the five year contract, this aggregates to a total of $15 million dollars.
Using a typical cloud-based storage solution with on-body cameras will cost an agency approximately $1000/officer/year. With 1,500 officers, storage will cost $3 million over two years. Quantum’s cloud-based storage costs $718/officer/year, which saves the agency 28 percent compared to competition over two years. With Quantum’s intelligent storage (i.e. tiered solution) described before, storing the same amount of data costs just $213/officer/year, saving 79 percent of the price of competition's solution over two years.