Network Communications News (NCN) May 2017 | Page 31

IP SECURITY
Getting to grips with
storage requirements
‘With so
many storage
solutions
on offer, it
can be a
confusing
marketplace
for end users.’
With the trend for sur veillance
continuing to rise, organisations
need their storage solutions to be
cost effective, highly effective,
available and delivered to the
right places.
The first step to being able to
establish storage requirements is
to understand how and what the
video is used for, what the scale
of the data output is, and how and
why video will need to be retrieved.
Lee Cauchie, EMEA OEM Video
Surveillance BDM, Dell EMC, says:
‘Combining a storage and video
strategy can be much faster and
more straightforward if customers
have the right vision for their
business. Planning ahead of time
while understanding the role of
storage in video recording, storing
and processing, will help drive
a much more efficient, scalable,
performance predictable, mistake-
free solution.’
Upward trend in
video driving storage
End users need to be able to
predict the impact that increasing
video recordings will have on their
storage requirements so that their
storage solution will be capable of
supporting their needs as they grow.
Not doing so, they risk challenges
and issues arising further down the
line (and often when they need to
access footage the most). According
to Mr Cauchie, they should be
specifying this as early as the first
stages in the solution lifecycle.
He says: ‘Video formats used
are crucial and should be one of
the first elements to look at when
designing a storage solution.
Now more than ever, videos
are recorded in high resolution,
causing storage ratio per minute
to increase enormously. This
raises the need to be able to
scale in capacity faster without
disrupting the business while
having a solution that will
suppor t the growth in bandwidth.
Robustness of the solution is also
an impor tant element that must
be taken into account. The days
of storing video on a box full of
disks are long gone.
The enormous amount of data
created by video solutions, and
the varying conditions of how
this data should be stored, is the
most fundamental consideration
according to Dave Taylor, executive
architect, Software Defined
Storage Solutions, IBM Corporation:
‘I often refer to video as turning on
a water hydrant, as the speed and
the sheer amount of data is huge,
and importantly, you have to catch
every single drop!
‘Tackling the storage
requirements of this data can be
seen to be a huge task in itself.
However, when assessing video
assets, they can be divided up
according to how likely it is they
will need to be accessed, how
frequently that might be, and what
it is the asset will be used for e.g.
analytics. It’s very likely there
will be a huge amount of video
that will never be accessed again
e.g. ‘the footage from the camera
monitoring the perimeter’, which
differs from other organisational
data because it is streamed in
real-time and multiple streams
are stored in parallel. The result
is a phenomenal amount of data
which means you can’t simply
‘grab a few disks and put them in
a cabinet’.
‘With so many storage
solutions on offer, from the private
cloud and public cloud, to disks,
tapes and hard drives, to hybrid
solutions; it can be a confusing
marketplace for end users. We
work with the best storage
vendors in the world, as when
it comes to storing video, there
should be no compromise, or do so
at your peril.’
May 2017 | 31