LAS VEGAS - In recent years, the falling prices of hard drives combined with the near infinite storage capacity offered by the cloud have made the issue of archiving video footage and other types of data almost an afterthought. However, the storage burdens created by the proliferation of high-resolution cameras along with the increased desire by many organizations, particularly those in the government sector, to hold onto footage for longer periods of time have made video storage a key consideration in surveillance projects once again.
In fact, just last year, the City of Baltimore was forced to reduce the retention period on some of its cameras from 28 days to just three because they had nearly reached their maximum storage capacity following the riots that erupted in city over the death of Freddie Gray. The solution for video storage woes like those experienced in Baltimore may lie not in some technology that has yet to be developed but rather one that has been around for well over a decade – tape-based storage.
Among the exhibitor’s at this year’s ISC West show is the LTO (Linear Tape-Open) Program, a collaboration between Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and Quantum, which worked together in the late 1990s to initially develop Linear Tape-Open technology. As part of the LTO program, these companies are now responsible for overseeing the open format technology by developing various specifications and publishing a roadmap for it. These specifications are open to any vendor that would like to make LTO products, all of which are certified by a third-party as having met the format’s standards.
According to Laura Loredo, worldwide product manager, HP Enterprise Servers Storage & Networking, the LTO format is currently in its seventh generation with cartridges capable of storing up to 15-terabytes of compressed data.
“With generation five, we introduced partitioning in the format, which allowed us to create a file system, so with generation five, six and seven we have LTFS (Linear Tape File System) which allows the tape drive to be recognized by the operating system as a storage device the same way it would recognize hard drives or a USB stick,” said Loredo. “It’s vendor and operating system agnostic, so you can just drag and drop like you would with your USB stick and share information across different platforms.”
Shawn Brume, Sc.D., business line executive- data protection and retention at IBM, said the LTO Program has been very active in the video surveillance market and had worked with several of the industry’s largest video management software providers, including Genetec and Milestone Systems, to make the security industry aware that this technology is there.
“Preparing today is going to be much easier than trying to catch up in the future,” said Brume. “We’ve heard in past, ‘Well, we don’t keep a lot of data, it just recycles every 30 to 90 days.’ We’re dealing with a lot of customers coming back to us because they are now keeping that data longer because of whatever legislation… and to wait for that looming tragedy is going to be difficult to recover from.”
“It’s a technology that has been around for the last 16 years,” said Loredo “It’s proven and we have been very successful in the traditional IT market. The technology has also been used in media and entertainment where they also went through a transition from analog to digital and all of their assets are kept digitally and they need longer retention periods for high-quality video.”
Being that tape-based storage is predominantly a lower cost backup option for data that is already being stored elsewhere, such as on a disk or in the cloud, Brume said they certainly encourage organizations to continue to use those methods as their primary means of storage. However, leveraging a service like the cloud for long-term video storage may not be as cost-efficient as people think.
“A lot of security requirements are finding that the cost of cloud is actually much more expensive, especially when a lot of this data just sits around and stays for years,” explained Brume. “The latest governmental requirements in the U.S. indicate that if you have surveillance at a federal building, you must keep [the footage] for seven years and you can’t just keep incidents, you have to keep all of it. It really comes down to what is the real cost of keeping that data and tapes cost anywhere from a fifth to a twentieth of keeping an archive in the cloud.”
Obviously, one of the biggest issues surrounding the storage of video today is about the security of the footage itself. Using tape storage, organizations can store footage offline to guard against online data corruption and it can also be stored offsite in case the user is ever confronted with a disaster recovery situation. Tape drives also feature hardware-based data encryption for added security.
“For generations now, we’ve had encryptions on the tape drives and we’ve very much focused on security of data over the last 15 to 16 years as both legislation and corporate requirements have met new peaks for retaining data,” said Brume.
There has also been popular myth that disk is better than tape from the standpoint of performance, but Brume said that’s just simply not the case.
“When you start to deal with datasets or globs of datasets, such as the cloud or the archive portion of digital surveillance, they become very large files and accessing them means I need to stream them back really fast. LTO technology with LTO 7 can stream back data at 300-megabytes per second,” he explained. “No single disk drive can do that today.”
