Storage A Challenge With Today's Surveillance Cameras

Feb 12, 2008 4:17 PM

With digital video on the rise in enterprises, IT storage teams will play a key role in accommodating the petabytes of data that can be generated by video surveillance systems.

With falling costs of digital video surveillance systems, organizations can now buy additional IP video technology and do more with video data. In addition to combating fraud and crime, companies are applying analytics to video data to aid merchandising, operations and customer service. "The advent of IP video is one of the key things that changed surveillance video from a sleepy technology backwater to something that IT needs to get involved in," says Steven Norall, senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group.

Industry researcher Frost & Sullivan sees the transition to IP video having a far-reaching impact on storage. According to company research, "the most important advantage in an IP surveillance network is the capability of storing large quantities of video footage in a relatively limited storage space with much higher image quality than analog networks."

"Companies doing surveillance are generating a lot more data, 24/7. The data is increasingly high resolution. Now they want to see a recognizable face," says Rick Bentley, CEO at video surveillance system integrator Connexed Technologies.

The IP video surveillance storage market is on a steady growth track. Garnering $767 million in revenue in 2003, the market is projected to reach $1.7 billion in 2008 and top $2.9 billion by 2013, according to Frost & Sullivan.

"Storage stands to receive a large chunk of that money, currently about 25 percent," says Dilip Sarangan, research analyst in the North America AutoID and Security Practice at Frost & Sullivan. "Storage is the largest and most expensive component in a video surveillance system."

As soon as the video surveillance stream has been digitized and directed across a network, companies can implement shared, scalable network storage instead of being limited to the storage typically attached to each digital video recorder (DVR). "DVRs create islands of storage," says Lee Caswell, chief strategy officer and founder of Pivot3. Islands of video storage suffer from the same inefficiencies and unnecessary management overhead as the islands of data storage that drove enterprises to implement storage area networks (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS).

However, some say companies don't need the latest IP video cameras to take advantage of digitized video. "Companies still use a lot of analog cameras," Caswell says. "They aren't going to replace those cameras that fast because today there is still about a $250 price delta between an IP camera and a conventional video camera." By using an encoder, companies can capture and digitize the incoming analog video data stream before shipping it over a LAN to networked storage.

The importance of IP video can be seen in the arrival of a new class of video product, the network video recorder (NVR), which captures data feeds from multiple cameras for storage on directly attached disks. "The NVR is like the old DVR except that it attaches to the network. You can log in remotely and access data or manage it over the network," Bentley says.

Even with block-based iSCSI storage, not every product can handle the demands of video surveillance storage. For starters, the amount of storage can be staggering. "Video surveillance will probably make up the single biggest data store in the enterprise," says Bentley at Connexed Technologies.

Storage managers who think giving each e-mail user 2GB of storage space is a big deal will be shocked. Consider the following formula: Take the number of cameras generating video streams 24/7 and the megapixel resolution of the new cameras and an acceptable frame per second (fps) rate (3fps to 5fps won't cut it--think 10fps, 15fps, 20fps) with medium compression and multiply that by the length of time you want to store the data.

The total is a very big number. The need to store 30GB to 40GB per camera per day isn't unusual. That comes to 1TB or more per camera per month. Now, if a retail organization has 30 to 40 cameras per store and 1,000 stores, you're looking at multipetabytes of storage, even if you're rewriting over some old data.

Another challenge is the storage workload. "This is not your typical enterprise storage workload," says Jeff Whitney, VP of marketing at Intransa. For example, surveillance storage is 95 percent to 98 percent writing. "It is hard to keep up with a near constant write load," he notes. "The storage system doesn't have any time for the usual housekeeping."

Most SAN storage arrays are optimised for business workloads that use small blocks and present a balance of read/write activity. "With video surveillance, you are constantly writing large sequential blocks," Whitney adds. And you don't keep it long; often just a week, a month, a year at most. And skip the backup; RAID 5 is all the protection that's required.

Finally, video storage has to be simple. The systems are usually deployed and operated by security and facilities people who don't understand storage provisioning and networking. LUNs, zones, masking, RAID--forget it. "You need fast performance to the drive, linear scalability and utterly simple management," says Caswell at Pivot3. That's why DVR/NVR appliances have been such a hit; however, they can't scale in the face of the storage capacities required.

Until recently, a handful of nonstorage vendors - Bosch, JVC and Toshiba - dominated the video security market and offered complete solutions with embedded hard drives for storage. Cisco, through the acquisition of SyPixx Networks Inc. (2006) and BroadWare Technologies (2007), is poised to enter the market.

The surveillance market would seem ideal for low-cost storage vendors, but that hasn't been the case. "This is a market for cheap iSCSI, but companies like Dell are focused on the small- to medium-sized market. Network Appliance is aiming more at the data center," Norall says. Products optimized for those markets won't meet surveillance storage requirements.

Maybe the biggest challenge storage professionals face will be working with the group that's mainly responsible for surveillance video. "The security people may not be so welcoming," Caswell says. "They see storage as just a small part of the overall solution." They're quite comfortable buying complete solutions from one vendor or integrator.

No matter who controls the video surveillance budget, the storage team will be asked to build out the necessary capacity to store video. And they'll have to learn the idiosyncrasies of surveillance storage because it's not going away.

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© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

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