It goes without saying that today’s video surveillance systems are generating more video data than before. More and more IP cameras are moving towards UHD, while many countries require that video be retained for a lengthy period of time. These factors create a significant impact on storage.
It goes without saying that today’s video surveillance systems are generating more video data than before. More and more IP cameras are moving towards UHD, while many countries require that video be retained for a lengthy period of time. These factors create a significant impact on storage as solutions providers enhance the cost-effectiveness and performance of their offerings.
William Chen, Senior Storage
Solutions Manager, Dell Taiwan
Video is now one of the biggest sources of data in the world. Contributing to this data is a growth in cameras. While IHS forecasted that some 98 million network surveillance cameras would be shipped in 2017, it mentions that globally, the video surveillance market is still not saturated and expects to see a CAGR of 20 percent in new camera unit shipments from 2014 to 2019. Longer video retention, meanwhile, also plays a large role in the amount of data generated. All these factors are having a major effect on storage, which plays the key role in storing all the video data generated.
Cost, Performance Matter
Given the overwhelming amounts of data generated by cameras, especially in large surveillance projects for example airports or safe cities, end users are looking for cost-effectiveness and high performance in their storage. Solutions that help customers in this regard, therefore, have become more important.
Users typically look at how much they have to pay per gigabyte to determine the overall cost of their storage. Obviously, the lower the cost per GB the more appealing the system will be, and solutions providers that can bring down that cost can win the user’s favor. “For 1 petabyte of data, we can lower per GB cost to US$0.18. Looking from another perspective, if the client wants to store 1PB of data, we can provide capacity of 800TB or even 500TB to hold that amount of data,” said William Chen, Senior Storage Solutions Manager at
Dell Taiwan. “We’re able to do that not because of the lower price with which we obtain components, for example HDDs, but because of the data deduplication, compression and other technologies that we offer.”
Wayne Arvidson, VP,
Intelligence, Surveillance and
Security Solutions, Quantum
More and more, users are saving money by turning to tiered storage, whereby the storage system is divided into tiers by the importance of data – data that are more critical are stored in a higher, more reliable and more expensive tier, and vice versa. “A tiered solution delivers total capacity more cost effectively; balances performance, capacity, and cost within each tier; and is scalable to grow with a user’s requirements,” said Wayne Arvidson, VP of Intelligence, Surveillance and Security Solutions at
Quantum. “This will also leave project money for the other tools needed to accomplish the mission.”
In terms of performance, it can be measured by various factors, one of which is latency, or the time it takes to complete a read/write operation. Latency is typically measured in milliseconds (ms) and should be as low as possible.
Performance can be affected by a range of factors, and the systems integrator must take them into consideration when designing a high-performance storage system. “For example, is the network speed 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps? Is the recording server enterprise-level or is it just a PC? Are you using enterprise-grade disk array or just RAID? All these will affect the storage system’s performance,” Chen said.