Video Surveillance Doesn’t Need an Archive – It Needs an Active Archive
Personal data security concept with digital screen with fingerprint, digital code and radar at CCTV camera background. Double exposure
Video surveillance is very much an emerging use case for active archives. After all, there is incredible growth in the amount of video surveillance content being produced. Inexpensive, high-resolution video surveillance cameras are being used in almost every aspect of life today, whether it’s hospitals, universities, office buildings, shopping malls, city streets, theme parks, casinos, airports, transportation systems, factories, banks, distribution centers, or sports venues. The benefits of video surveillance are many and they include security and safety for both people and property.
But video surveillance faces two big challenges: storage and long-term retention. Watch any crime show on TV and there are usually problems related to closed circuit TV recordings that went missing or video systems they only record the last day or the last seven days. What is needed is a way to economically store and rapidly retrieve large quantities of video surveillance for long periods.
Take for example, an installation of 500 x 1080p cameras producing 30 frames per second. 90 days of retention over five years would generate 4.2 petabytes of storage. That’s just one facility. There are thousands and perhaps even tens of thousands of such sites across North America and as many again in Europe and Asia.
According to IDC, the entire video surveillance industry already consumes 100 exabytes of hard disk drive (HDD) capacity per year. That is a tremendous amount of data. 100 exabytes is equal to 5.5 million 18TB HDDs or 5.5 million LTO 9 tape cartridges.
The volume of video surveillance capacity is only going to increase in the coming years. Camera resolution rates are steadily improving. Organizations want to institute longer retention periods. People want to keep their content for longer periods. In addition, artificial intelligence analytics are now being applied to video surveillance content to glean more insight from it. This adds up to quite a storage challenge.
Active Archives are Not Traditional Archives
There is already a colossal cost involved in video surveillance storage, not to mention the vast amount of energy consumed by storing this content almost exclusively on hard drives. Yet the video surveillance industry has traditionally been averse to archiving of content for various reasons. Video surveillance operators usually look upon archives as being systems where you wait around for an hour or two or even longer to get video content from an archive. It also meant having to haggle with an IT department to find the content they needed or enter into a long period of manual labor to hunt through old tapes for the information they needed.
Another negative in the minds of video surveillance operators is that they associate tape with old VHS cartridges. Video was all carried on VHS until about 20 years ago. The industry thinks upon tape as VHS, not as the state-of-the-are LTO form factor that exists today.
Active archives are very different from old musty VHS tape archives. And they will play a major role in video surveillance to solve its storage, retention, cost and energy consumption challenges. The ideal architecture for video surveillance is to retain data initially on disk inside storage servers for perhaps 14 days. Anything longer than that is transferred to a tape library system running LTO cartridges. This enables the operator to rapidly search back beyond 14 days and only wait three to eight minutes to find the data and have it available for review. This two-tier system enables much longer retention periods at the original resolution of the content, which is important when you do need video content for say evidentiary reasons. By moving data to a much lower cost tier of storage, and energy consumption is slashed.
Take the above example of 500 x 1080p cameras. A mix of both tape and disk would yield a 58% cost reduction as opposed to keeping all that content on disk. In addition, tape consumes 87% less energy and produces 97% less CO2e.
You can find out more about emerging use cases for active archives by listening to the webinar …
