7 minute read
The hard drive into the cloud
INTERVIEW
The drive to cloud storage
We are generating more video surveillance data than ever before and the value of that information has never been higher. We talk to Jermaine Campbell of Seagate Technology about how the way we store data is changing and why installers have a role in the development of solutions
According to the 2020 Seagate report entitled ‘Rethink Data’, data growth has been and will continue to be unprecedented in volume. The survey predicted that in just two years, from the beginning of 2020 through the beginning of 2022, enterprises would see a 42.2% annual increase in the volume of generated data. We are now at the end point of this period so we are living in a time of record-breaking requirements for storage space.
The survey data indicated that three factors are the most important catalysts for the growth of stored data: increasing use of analytics, the proliferation of IoT devices and cloud migration initiatives. Survey respondents indicated that approximately 30% of stored data is found in internal data centres, 20% in third-party data centres, 19% in edge data centres or remote locations, 22% in cloud repositories, and 9% in other locations. The report predicts that storage environments will remain dispersed and complex for the foreseeable future.
So how will a market such as video surveillance, which is generating more content than ever and using it for more purposes than it was originally collected, change, in regard to onsite and cloud storage? To find out, we spoke to Jermaine Campbell, Surveillance Segment Lead EMEA at Seagate to discuss how the video surveillance storage climate is evolving.
As a company known for HDDs, how has the development of cloud storage affected your business? We have seen growth in the use of cloud storage in the video surveillance sector, but as a company known for its Skyhawk HDDs installed into local NVRs, I think it is important to understand that we don't see one technology competing against the other. For Seagate this development of the cloud is not creating a competition between cloud-based storage and local, on premise storage. The growth of cloud storage has actually created an opportunity for Seagate, our customers and our partners as we have been instrumental in growing video-as-aservice (VSaaS) and creating cloud offerings for surveillance. We've achieved this by creating mass storage drives (EXOS) that are suitable for cloud storage and created our own systems that can be used for people hosting private or public cloud, so, we are building entire solutions as well as single hard drive devices. Most recently we have brought our Lyve offerings, Lyve Cloud and Lyve Mobile to the market. These are S3 compatible, storage solutions for video surveillance. So, the development of the cloud has been an opportunity for us in terms of being able to leverage our own mass storage portfolio to meet the demands of those using the cloud.
What are hybrid systems and what are the benefits for installers and their customers? A hybrid system enables you to store your data locally via NVR and also store data off-premises via cloud-based storage. So why would somebody want to do that? We're seeing that the amount of data that people need to record, hold onto and analyse is growing and up until now you would need to rejuvenate your local hardware and storage space to cope with the increase in data being stored. With hybrid, you have an option where you can record and keep the data that you need on-site for easy access to write or to read urgent ‘hot’ data. Then if you have an application for which you need to retain the data for longer and you need to archive or
Jermaine Campbell
INTERVIEW
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search with analytics etc, you can send that information off into the cloud. You can choose to do that with third-party cloud offerings or, as Seagate, we offer our own cloud storage solutions (Lyve Cloud) which are coming to Europe next calendar year. With this approach you just pay for how many terabytes that you send to the cloud per month.
How much more complex is it to set something like that up, rather than just putting a hard drive in a DVR? It's a great question and in my view, I don't think any technology really takes off until it becomes user-friendly. We know that people expect to be able to press a button and see the recording process begin. We understand that VSaaS needs to be simple and we've created a system which makes it very, very simple to use. You create a cloud account and choose your target to decide what you are saving locally and what you are saving into the cloud and how often this is to happen. It's already a simple procedure but I'm sure it will become even simpler in time. Essentially I think it's becoming a lot less complex for installers to be able to choose these kinds of hybrid or cloud-based storage options and the easier we can make that process the more it helps installers.
We're all consumers, we all use electronic technology so are the requirements of the end user what drives the direction of the business? The requirements of both the end user and the installer are what drive our technology and what we bring to market. To see how the requirements of VIA systems storage systems have changed, we need to look back at the evolution of CCTV. Once we were working at five frames per second with black and white video and no audio at, whereas today we are capturing video at 25 frames per second in full colour HD with audio. Now we're not just recording footage when there is movement in a zone, cameras are recording 24/7 because there is data being generated that can be used at a later stage - and not just for security purposes.
What has definitely changed is that the data being captured is more valuable than ever before. In the past, that data was only valuable if an incident occurred, but that has changed now because we can do so much more with that information in terms of business insights; we are starting to see a proliferation of different applications like smart city, smart hospitals, smart factories etc, so businesses want to record more data and keep it for longer for analytics.
Are the security concerns around cloud storage still there or have we moved on from that? I think there are still some concerns regarding saving data in the cloud, but if you look at what cloud storage is now, these concerns have been dealt with. There are technologies that make data more secure such as offering data immutability, so if you record something up into our Lyve Cloud S3 storage for example, only you can decide who can access it. To anybody else the data is scrambled and unreadable. As cloud systems become more prevalent, simpler, more cost effective and more secure, people's confidence will grow. And let's not forget, we have hybrid solutions too, so it's not a case of using one or the other.
One day in the future will we see total cloud storage with no-one storing anything on-site? As mentioned earlier, what drives technology and solutions is meeting the requirements of the installer and the customer. With more and more data being created at the end point I find it unlikely that people will want all of that data to move instantly to the cloud even though constantly improving bandwidths could enable it. I think that given the storage options available, end-users and installers will choose what suits them and they'll likely store some data on the edge and they'll have some in the cloud. While data is being generated at the end point I think there will always be a need to store data immediately, but cloud will become more and more popular especially as it becomes more cost-effective and simpler. We also need to keep regulatory requirements in mind as well in regard to storing data for longer periods. And do people really want to be spending money on their own servers for storage purposes when there is a cheaper subscription-based alternative?
