Why Speed Is Crucial for Video Surveillance Storage

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High-definition (HD) 1080p cameras and ultra-HD 4K cameras are all the rage in video surveillance right now. In fact, HD 1080p cameras are now so affordable that they’ve become the new standard for home and commercial surveillance. And 4K cameras are the minimum for video analytics.

Whether you’re deploying 1 or 1,000 HD cameras, if you’re not thinking about your storage speed, you could be in trouble.

Are You Dropping Frames? Are You Sure?

Today’s HD cameras crank out an incredible volume of data. As these data streams grow, video applications are expected to move a lot of volume in a very short time. Take your phone, for example. One minute of video shot at 720p creates 40MB of data. At the camera’s highest 4K setting, you’d need 10 times the space for the same minute of video. The ability of your video surveillance applications to function seamlessly depends on your infrastructure’s ability to serve up video data in real time without dropping frames.

To capture video data at the same rate as your camera, you need storage with high throughput and low latency. Missing frames or reduced quality due to infrastructure limitations could drop critical pieces of data. This is especially true in fast-paced, high-security environments, such as gaming, transportation, or corrections, where nonstop coverage is critical. And it doesn’t take much. If you are collecting 30 frames per second and you drop 15 of them, you’ve lost half your data.

A lot can happen in that fraction of a second. You could miss a pickpocket’s sleight of hand, the flash of a weapon, or the slice in a chain-link fence. You might not even know you’ve dropped frames until it is too late. License plate reading software goes frame by frame through video, identifying numbers on each plate and creating metadata. If a car drives by at 60 miles per hour and you’ve dropped those frames, you might miss the plate entirely.

Never Miss a Moment

Speed is not just how fast your data is moving, but how well it performs and how easily you can derive insights from it. You need to be able to go back and mine data from hundreds, possibly thousands, of cameras in real time. If an incident or a security breach occurs, these processes must be seamless. You can’t be worried about taxing your infrastructure beyond its limits.

The NetApp^® video surveillance storage solution built on NetApp E-Series technology has the speed and throughput you need to maintain seamless video operation, with plenty of headroom to grow. Our entry-level systems can scale up to 3GBps throughput—almost three times what other video surveillance storage systems can provide—to support hundreds or even thousands of cameras. E-Series’ balanced design is a proven powerhouse, with over 30 years of developmental refinement, giving you a fast, simple, reliable system for every video workload.

Learn more about how the NetApp video surveillance storage solution delivers the speed you need in this white paper.

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