Video data is being created faster today than ever before. A big reason for this growth is the increasing use of video surveillance systems (VSS) across a rapidly expanding set of verticals and use cases. Cameras are now everywhere. Virtually every corner of the office, manufacturing facility, hospital, dashboard, sidewalk, front door, and even on law enforcement uniforms. It’s estimated that nearly 18 exabytes of video will be captured by 2025.
On top of the increased coverage, cameras are becoming more advanced, delivering higher quality images, at greater resolutions, and even faster frame rates.
The data from these devices are not only creating larger files, but more complex management, as video files can vary greatly in size, and are often required to be retained anywhere from a few days to over a year.
These variables make video data storage a challenge for IT and security teams, especially with strict budgets.
How is VSS Being Used Today?
As we mentioned above, VSS is nearly everywhere these days. It’s so widespread that 80% of organizations are doing some form of VSS. Surveillance is increasingly being used as a way to increase security, improve traffic, and create safer experiences for people in many areas of physical gathering..
Police departments, correctional facilities, schools, governments, and even stadiums and entertainment venues all have varied needs and requirements.
Auckland Transportation, for example, uses VSS (and Qumulo) to help ease traffic congestion and improve safety across the city’s transportation routes. The San Francisco 49ers use VSS at both their stadium and practice facilities to improve both safety and security.
What Are the Challenges of VSS?
Regardless of the use cases, we see the same sorts of challenges creeping up.
The big one we see is the sheer volume of data being produced is becoming increasingly hard to manage. File sizes vary, image and video quality can be different, and you never fully know what your storage needs will be. Legacy systems struggle with these variables. They were often designed to do one thing (or one kind of thing) and, while they do that one thing quite well, these systems aren’t as good at straying from that. For example, simply upgrading to a high-resolution feed could be all it takes to overwhelm a system designed for lower-resolution footage.
On top of that, storing that much data is a challenge on its own. Even one 4k camera creates up to 250GB of data a day. When you scale that out across an entire city or even a medium-sized school, your storage needs to become enormous.
The problem is that legacy systems can’t hold unlimited data and often have to rewrite data after a certain amount of time, meaning that if you need to go back 12 months to look at something, but your system reuses available space every six months, you’re not going to find what you’re looking for. This is particularly critical for situations like schools and casinos where losing even a single frame of footage can be devastating.
There are also challenges around data ownership and different groups using different platforms. This becomes a challenge if you need to share data, but one group in your company is using AWS and another has Azure. You’d need different tools to access and manage that data, which makes breaking out of these different data silos difficult. This also decreases visibility, which makes troubleshooting (among other things hard).
How Can Qumulo Help With Your VSS Needs?
Qumulo provides a single, scalable platform that helps you manage your data.
What this means for your VSS capacity planning is that you no longer have to worry about over-or-underestimating how much data will be needed. With Qumulo, performance scales linearly as capacity is added, so you can easily adapt to changing video data needs as they come. If you need to add cameras, no problem.
We also give you unparalleled visibility into your data. If something’s slowing you down or causing problems, you can quickly figure out exactly what the problem is and solve it. This helps ensure that you don’t end up with corrupt footage because of a problem you can’t find. And, it reduces downtime because you’re not wasting days or weeks solving the problem, you’re troubleshooting and solving the problem in no time.
On top of that, Qumulo is solution agnostic. It doesn’t matter what solution you’re using to store your data, we can work with it. Even if one department uses AWS and another is on Azure, Qumulo can help manage everything. This lets you all but eliminate data silos within your organization because all data is being managed by a single tool.
We also know the importance of a system that has resilience built in. We noted above the importance of not missing anything and unplanned downtime can lead to huge amounts of loss. Qumulo was built to ensure maximum uptime. Along with built-in protection and security features like erasure coding, snapshots, continuous replication, and encryption, we provide non-disruptive upgrades. Your system won’t go down every time there’s a patch.
If you’d like to learn more about how Qumulo can help with your VSS needs, contact us today. We can help determine your needs and implement a VSS data management solution that works for you.
