Harnessing stored information for growth and innovation

Over the years the amount of information stored has grown from megabytes to geopbytes, confirming the need to successfully store and access huge amounts of data. As demand for storage technology grows the need for greater efficiency and more advanced capabilities continues to evolve. “The amount of unstructured data will definitely grow, pushing the government and companies to deploy more storage setups that can preserve data for the long haul while also providing rapid access and performance,” says Rajesh Khurana – Country Manager for India & SAARC, Seagate Technology. In conversation with Ankush Kumar.

Edited Excerpts:

What is driving video surveillance in India?

Rising need for advanced security, India’s smart cities agenda, growing IT infrastructure, increasing IT spending, surging need for video analytics and remote monitoring are the trends driving the video surveillance market in India.
According to Seagate’s ‘Video Surveillance Trend Report’, 85 percent of nearly 1,100 system integrators and enterprise IT executives globally across a wide range of industries, said that the key reason driving video surveillance is safety and security. The need to optimize work flows (53 percent) and regulatory compliance (48 percent) were also picked as the main driver for using video surveillance.

Which sectors in India are adopting video surveillance?

The government is one of the major sectors for video surveillance. To ensure safety and security of the masses, government has set up surveillance cameras at railway stations, housing estates, traffic signals and other public places. Recently, India is also witnessing a surge in the use of video surveillance by sectors like banking and financial, hospitality, transportation, education and retail, etc.

What are the challenges associated with implementation of video surveillance in India?

Video surveillance is ‘always on’ – in fact, on average organisations use more than 239 cameras 24 hours a day, 7 days of the week, 365 days of the year. When you think about the image content of surveillance cameras, there are huge amounts of data surrounding it – location, time of day, duration of video and more.
In order to satisfy the substantial capacity requirements, some have chosen to utilize low-end, moderate-capacity desktop drives in their video security systems. Their goal is to minimize storage costs; unfortunately, such efforts have met with little success.
Deploying limited-capacity desktop drives imposes significant limitations and liabilities on video security systems, negating any theoretical cost savings. Furthermore, with no application-specific features to address power management, desktop drives can suffer heat-related failures caused by the rigorous duty-cycle and power-on requirements of surveillance configurations.
Video security solutions have unique requirements that demand hard drives specifically engineered to meet those needs. Purpose-built surveillance drives are optimized for video security use, incorporating advanced power management capabilities. In those video security systems where massive amounts of information are stored, the large number of drives required can present power consumption challenges at system startup. Surveillance-optimized drives solve this by drawing less current at startup, which enables the use of smaller power supplies that produce less heat.

What is boosting the demand of storage solutions in India?

From sensors that monitor building access and security and fire detection, to sensors that monitor environmental conditions and energy consumption, to a variety of other network-connected monitoring applications, it will be interesting to see how the growth of storage solutions will continue to increase.
At the same time, the amount of unstructured data will grow even as budgets for storage technology remain tight. So the government and companies will need storage setups that can preserve data for the long haul while also providing rapid access and performance.

What is the USP of Seagate storage solutions?

Seagate has been in the surveillance segment longer than any other manufacturer, for more than 30 years, and can help customers match need with function, while offering scalable solutions as their businesses grow.
Seagate Surveillance HDD has a one million hour MTBF, (mean time between failure) allowing it to be kept in the field longer while reducing the cost of field deployment. Similarly, the Enterprise Capacity RAID based Surveillance storage drive from Seagate, has 1.4 million hours MTBF, making it ideal for a high density file-storage system. These specialised surveillance drives from Seagate ensures better streaming performance and reliability in surveillance environments.
Seagate recently announced the launch of the world’s first 8TB surveillance HDD. This is considered as the largest drive of its kind for surveillance applications in the industry. This HDD is built to meet the growing storage and access needs of SMBs and large enterprises. The Surveillance HDD 8TB can serve as a critical component to ensure successful, scalable and reliable solutions so business leaders can focus on other priorities knowing they have the coverage they need. Engineered to run 24×7, the 3.5-inch drive can store over 800 hours of high-definition (HD) content captured by up to 64 cameras simultaneously recording HD content.
In addition, Seagate delivers world’s only surveillance hard disk drive featuring recovery service. These services can complement drive warranty terms to cover a drive crash, virus or failure to recover data. Supplement your backups with recovery services to gain peace of mind and ensure you remain within compliance of industry regulations.

What is the difference between a normal hard drive and a surveillance drive?

The use of a normal desktop HDD and surveillance HDD is very different and hence their functioning is also different. A traditional desktop HDD is tuned for a balanced read-write ratio for eight hours in a day, whereas, a surveillance HDD uses 90% of its time (24*7*365 days) for recording video and 10% for reviewing and playing backed data. The surveillance HDDs firmware is custom built for streaming videos. It captures every pixel while streaming HD videos. Unlike desktop HDDs, Surveillance system uses a large number of drives. Vibrations from these drives and other servers can lead to performance loss. Seagate Surveillance HDDs have rotational vibration sensors to minimise impact and preserve drive performance.