09 February 2010
Tuesday
The storage behind intelligent video surveillance
By Khoo Boo Leong | Feb 22, 2009
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PrintThe move from analog CCTV with analog VCR to intelligent IP surveillance has opened up opportunities for the video surveillance market to grow its revenues of about US$13.5 billion in 2006 to a projected $46 billion in 2013, according to ABI Research.
While security remains the obvious application, promising markets such as transportation and retail are using video surveillance to prevent legal liability, analyse customer behaviour and design stores. For example, they use facial recognition software to analyse shoppers’ behaviour within stores by tracking eyeball movements as shoppers view product displays.
ABI Research also projected that global spending on video surveillance for transportation markets will jump from about $630 million in 2006 to $2 billion in 2013, while retail will account for a spending rise from about $1 billion in 2006 to almost $4 billion in 2013.
“Video surveillance is suitable for a wide range of industries including government, telecommunication, healthcare, finance, education and manufacturing,” said Vincent Low, the regional director of United Information Technology (UIT), a manufacturer of IP-SAN, FC-SAN and NAS solutions that are critical to video surveillance implementation.
“For instance, using wireless IP connectivity, you can monitor an entire railway line for trespassers. And in China, the government is trying to monitor entire metro areas in an effort to reduce crime. We’re integrating our hardware with our partners’ software for continuous monitoring and video forensics.”
The cost of a networked video surveillance system can be attributed to three main components: Front-end surveillance equipment such as security cameras, monitors, digital video recorders, encoders and decoders; a surveillance configuration and management server; and a video data storage system.
High capacity and high availability are key storage considerations as UIT’s storage systems serve increasingly large-scale surveillance deployments that involve more security cameras, higher frame rates, and megapixel-quality images.
High availability
The company’s video surveillance distributed storage solution, for instance, consists of a high-availability storage system such as the BM3600 Fibre Channel/Serial Attached SCSI (FC/SAS) array.
More importantly, it embeds the surveillance application software in the storage device. After being encoded, data is transmitted directly to the distributed video surveillance storage without having the read-write processing of the surveillance data first passing through a separate video server.
