A mass-capacity video storage infrastructure to store and manage smart city big data is needed.
The video security sector is transforming intensively, buoyed by increasing demand from connected devices in both public and private sectors. IDC predicts that the total amount of global data will grow exponentially to nearly 180 ZB by 2025. Among the data explosion, connected IoT devices will reach 39.3 billion globally and create 74.4ZB data in 2025 – and video security is the fastest growing category (19 percent by 2025) and the one that generates the most data among the connected devices, according to IDC Global Datapshere 2021.
Growth is expected to continue in the video management systems and video imaging and analytics (VIA) market, and will likely top $3.6 billion by 2025, driven by increasing demand for video data to support business process improvement activities. Delhi’s government has begun the installation of over 1.5M public security cameras in the national capital region to ensure citizen safety.
This is positively indicative of smart cities and increasing IoT devices with AI and machine learning applications to automate and improve efficiencies. The vast amount of data generated by the widely deployed induction and networking devices in cities is an important foundation for AI/ML, and successfully obtaining and analyzing these data is the key to improving smart cities. Therefore, how to effectively store, activate, and move the large amounts of data generated by these endpoints is a challenge at present.
Data in motion, citizens in action
Today’s smart cities are harnessing VIA storage for a multitude of purposes, including traffic management, safety enforcement, public utilities, smart retail to track footfalls and heatmaps on video, and smart manufacturing promoting factory floor efficiency through video analytics. Smart cameras have become intelligent computing devices that offer actionable insights and the ability to integrate with disparate systems and devices.
VIA storage needs to be interconnected across different storage, compute, security, and access measures, so that always-on and streamlined citizen services are provided. This will improve productivity of the public sectors and increase the value of citizen service with more transparency, adaptability, and responsiveness towards citizen needs. Enabling seamless orchestration between cloud resources will serve mass data ecosystems, opening new service offerings and smart city applications to citizens with actionable insights and intelligence.
AI-enabled and video-optimized storage
More video analytics means more data. For video storage solutions that can truly empower smart city applications, mass-capacity nearline HDDs are the backbone for that infrastructure. More than 20TB high capacity, storage drives today must be AI-enabled and purpose-built for network video recorders for edge security applications.
Seagate’s newest SkyHawk AI
20TB drive is a great example. It can intelligently adapt to the scale of a specific AI environment, while supporting up to 64 HD video streams and 32 AI streams. This allows the enterprise-grade drive to manage the large amount of data generated from video cameras, support scalable AI workloads, and meet the growing needs of advanced VIA, as SkyHawk AI 20TB HDD can both analyze and record video footage while simultaneously supporting GPU analytics.
Built with ImagePerfect AI firmware, the drive delivers zero dropped frames while supporting heavier workloads, effectively simplifying the operation process of public safety management agencies and improve management efficiency. The new Seagate AI drive also focuses on high reliability, as it is specced with an MTBF (mean time between failures) rating of two million hours and a 550TB/year workload rate. This equates to roughly more than three times the workload of standard VIA drives. They also come with built-in SkyHawk Health Management software to monitor drive health and flag potential issues to prevent data loss. Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery Services plan, an additional value-add, further safeguards organizations from any unforeseen drive failures.
From centralized to decentralized: A hybrid architecture is the key
Today, cities generate a lot of data, with a bulk of IoT devices deployed in offices, transportation systems, and public housing provide valuable real-time information to governments to improve the daily lives of their citizens. Real-time data is powerful. However, without the right infrastructure to accommodate hundreds of smart devices and video applications. Data are in silos without a real gateway and tools allowing these different services to exchange their information in a data lake for them to gain efficiency and responsiveness.
For security and law enforcement personnel requiring immediate insights from their intelligent video solutions, setbacks such as dropped frames or data loss inhibit deep learning and predictive analytics performance. For this reason, organizations are turning to data storage leader Seagate Technology to upgrade their storage infrastructure. In this era of smart cities and AI that is causing massive unstructured data sets to grow, it calls for a new way to data - a simple, trusted, and efficient mass-capacity edge-to-cloud storage platform.
For centralized storage locations that need to expand as public safety initiatives grow, servers equipped with Seagate Exos hard drives manage petabytes of data from thousands of cameras and offer Seagate Secure cybersecurity features for added protection.
To move from a centralized cloud to a hybrid infrastructure of both edge and cloud – across the distributed enterprise, is how data can be rethought and its value can be further unlocked. Hybrid systems using both on-prem storage systems and cloud networks that offer new options to extend one’s video storage capabilities to the edge — closer to the data source — to help overcome the barriers of data gravity. This is all without the expensive prospect of expanding hardware footprints, thus, lowering total cost ownership and drive costs per TB of storage, while offering additional layers of security compared to on-prem storage alone.
IDC’s 2021 Infrastructure Trends Survey found that 47 percent of enterprises who use a centralized cloud storage architecture will reduce to 22 percent next year. Conversely, 25 percent of respondents who currently have a hybrid storage architecture (a combination of both centralized and edge locations); that number will rise to 47 percent by 2023.
This is where technologies such as cloud storage as a service (StaaS) and an edge-to-cloud platform, such as Seagate’s
Lyve Cloud and
Lyve Mobile, present a new way to data, to serve mass data ecosystems in smart cities, liberating data in an open, extensible, and hybrid architecture with better economics, less friction, and simpler experience. That way, onboard video analytics can be incorporated into storage, creating a more distributed storage approach on the camera, at the edge, in the core, and in the cloud.
While smart city applications are increasing and providing more data to leverage, it is ultimately a robust hybrid storage infrastructure today that forms as the foundation of smart cities of tomorrow.