In this article we will know the advances that massive storage units have had, an industry that does not stop at their development. By: Duván Chaverra A.
Storage over information networks has been evolving by leaps and bounds in the security industry. The massive video recordings now allow to save hours and hours of registration and everything seems to indicate that this technology there is nothing or no one that can stop it, so day after day we will know so many amazing advances, which will make old products look just as the days go by.
This will be the topic we will discuss in this article: Massive network storage drives. And for this we will have the impressions of an expert in the subject such as Sergio Sánchez, project manager and technician of the support department of The Saltex Group, who will talk to us about the most recent advances in this regard and will also present his appreciations on this type of technology.
"In the development of new video recording technologies, capture devices have been evolving amazingly fast, moving from high-resolution analog cameras to Megapixel IP cameras. Initially, video recording was done on tape drives (video cassette) which allowed to save up to 960 hours of constant video. With new technologies and the high demand of users to keep recording files longer, it has been necessary for video storage technology to evolve in parallel to meet the new demands of the market," said our guest.
To meet these needs, technologies such as NAS (Network-attached Storage), DAS (Direct-attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network) were born, which determine the types of storage and topologies within data networks.
Today, storage capacity has reached unthinkable extremes years ago, as data can now be stored on hard drives in Terabytes, that is, 1024 gigabytes (GB).
"Currently an average mass recording unit gives us a minimum storage capacity of 10 Terabytes, and allows us to grow in a modular way to reach the capacities required by the user, this according to the array (RAID) and the configuration of other aspects of camera recording such as resolution, images per second, motion detection, among others," Sánchez explained.
Most important advances
To highlight, the representative of Saltex explained that the most recent novelty has been the development of ServerLess equipment, which can be understood as storage units that do not need physical servers in charge of managing video recording platforms.
"These drives are so robust that the total capacity of hard disk space can be divided into arrays according to the requirements of the video platform, a normal process in building massive drives. The interesting thing about the latest technologies is that the video management platform can be installed on a Virtual Machine (VM) where the operating system required by the manufacturer would be running."
This drive, which already comes with the hard disk space capacity for the amount and type of configuration of the installed cameras, would then prevent drives or servers dedicated solely to this and additionally external massive recording units from being used, which increases the costs of the implementation and therefore the development of the project itself.
Growth trend
The continuous development of video surveillance cameras is linked to the constant demands of the manufacturer of the industry to offer much more competitive products that meet the needs of the user.
"The market trend is increasingly demanding in recording capacity. Longer storage time is required with higher image quality. Let's understand that conventional IP cameras on the market have reached a very important level of development, since now we find them in Mega Pixel technology, so more bandwidth is required and therefore more space on hard disk, obviously it is important to establish that the stored image quality is considerably better, which is of utmost importance for facial recognition effects, digital zoom and other useful aspects if we are talking about solutions for forensic evidence," said the expert.
According to a study cited by Sergio Sánchez, conducted by the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, the electronic security market, more specifically that of video surveillance, tends to grow in 2013 to 12.3%: "In 2007 US$1,570 million dollars were invested in video surveillance, but it is expected that in 2013 there will be an investment of US$2,950 million dollars, which means a growth of 12.3%. It is highlighted in this study that the growth has occurred in the penetration markets of NVR (Network Video Recorder) and open storage platform systems."
Adaptability with other systems
How can this technology optimize corporate resources? According to Sergio Sánchez, companies also seek that the systems they acquire do not present any type of inconvenience with the equipment that already exists in the company: "Companies are looking for new technologies that are more efficient and reliable, but above all that can be implemented on some existing systems in their infrastructure, such as the same data networks. We know that if we are talking about IP technology, we can think about integration with access control platforms and why not, with the IP telephony platform."
The Saltex representative also added that "for the growth of an existing system, they can perfectly be deployed with external storage drives connected via iSCSI configurations, fiber optics at remote sites or within the same company data network."
The most common users who implement these types of units are those entities that need to store video from all regional and national or international offices, as well as government entities that need to store enough amounts of recording in high image quality, such as police control centers or dispatch centers.
However, the manufacturers of this type of systems are already working to reach all target audiences: "As markets must diversify, manufacturers are already structuring simpler units to attack small and medium more generic markets, in which storage needs are not so great, which allows them to market their units generating a greater inventory turnover", commented our guest.
This is just a sample of the permanent evolution of the security industry in Latin America. Mass video storage systems began with hard drives with a capacity of 80, 120 or 160 GB, and today there are 1.5 terabyte disks, the technology does not rest and in a short time we will be talking about Pentabytes storage units.
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