Ride the IP Video Surveillance Wave with Object Storage

Advancing camera technologies and pervasive connectivity have driven a transformation in the video surveillance industry, rapidly evolving digital video technologies into a legitimate new form of Big Data collection. Businesses of every size and industry are now investing heavily in video surveillance to safeguard property, monitor employees, increase public safety, and deter crime.

Internet protocol (IP) cameras are quickly moving the industry forward and offering enhanced functionality and lower costs than traditional analog technologies. Capturing and storing video files over IP networks provides greater flexibility, scalability, and ease of management, and enables video and imagery to be recorded and analyzed in real-time for allowing organizations to extract better data-driven intelligence from rich media.

According to recent research from Technavio, this rapid shift from analog to IP technologies is driving growth in the global video surveillance market, which is expected to reach $64 billion by 2020. Technavio’s research analysts also cite increased demand for wireless network infrastructure, rise in terrorist activities, and adoption of cloud-based services as other factors affecting the global market.

The increased use of IP cameras combined with rich media analytics are resulting in a number of new use cases for video surveillance. Cameras mounted on traffic signals or moving platforms like police cars can now identify vehicle characteristics and read license plates even at speeds over 100 MPH. Scene analysis capabilities can help detect suspicious objects/events and track behavior, something that is very useful for the transportation industry as well as for employee monitoring. And facial recognition and analysis can correctly identify age, sex, ethnicity, facial expression, and clothing to improve the profiling capabilities of many organizations, from intelligence agencies to retailers.

However, the surging popularity of IP technologies is producing some major challenges for organizations, particularly in terms of data storage. Greater numbers of IP video surveillance deployments are producing an overwhelming volume of data, and expanding the number of data sources that must be integrated and data types that must be supported. Striking a balance between scalability and performance in storage environments is crucial to enabling this wide new range of video surveillance applications.

As video surveillance deployments continue to soar and camera technologies advance, organizations will need to invest in storage architectures capable of addressing not only their existing video surveillance storage needs, but also data growth of the future. Object storage is allowing organizations to create a single pool of storage for constructing multi-petabyte active archive environments at lower costs. For mission-critical environments where downtime can be risky, object storage platforms also provide nearly 100% availability and reliability even during system upgrades and maintenance. Software-defined storage platforms can run on any standard x86 servers to enable linear growth and boost flexibility without the lock-in to specific hardware configurations.

Video surveillance is proving itself a valid new form of data collection, and the increasing use of high-definition camera technologies, video tagging, and rich media analytics will continue to rapidly increase storage requirements. To efficiently store and extract intelligence from these vast video datasets, organizations will need to adapt their storage infrastructures to build petabyte-scale, high-performance video surveillance archives. Object storage technologies can help organizations safeguard their existing video files, while providing the flexibility to seamlessly scale for accommodating the video data growth of tomorrow.