StorageCraft addresses law enforcement's growing need for video storage

Shortly after the civil unrest that occurred in Baltimore following the arrest and death of Freddie Gray in 2015, the city soon began running low on video storage capacity for its CitiWatch surveillance network as authorities wanted to retain as much footage as they could for evidentiary purposes. In fact, according to a story published at the time by the Baltimore Sun, storage capacity for some of the city’s 700 cameras was reduced from 28 days to just three.

Of course, the CitiWatch camera network consisted largely of stationary cameras installed throughout Baltimore. However, in the wake of the Gray case and other police-involved shootings across the country, an ever increasing number of law enforcement agencies are now deploying body-worn cameras as part of an effort to increase transparency when it comes to interactions between police and the public. In fact, a survey conducted by the Major Cities Chiefs Association and Major County Sheriffs' Association in 2016, found that nearly all (95 percent) large police departments have either already outfitted officers with body cameras or plan to do so moving forward. This has subsequently increased the video storage capacity requirements of municipal, county and state governments by several orders of magnitude and some are now realizing that they don’t have the scalability necessary to meet these challenges.

Although some of the more traditional enterprise-type video storage products would give law enforcement agencies the increased capacity they need, most of them simply do not have budget for these solutions which cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Enter StorageCraft, which has created a new storage solution, “StorageCraft for Law Enforcement,” which is tailored to meet the growing storage needs of police and sheriffs’ departments at a more budget-friendly price point.

According to Shridar Subramanian, vice president marketing and product management at StorageCraft, one of the biggest things that differentiates their offering from some of the more traditional video storage solutions on the market is that they don’t require the end-user to figure out exactly how much storage they are going to need in the future ahead of time and fork out the money that goes along with that. “What we have is a very simple scale-out solution where they can actually buy only the capacity they need today and, without having to do some complex calculations or use very sophisticated formulas, they can just keep adding more loads on the fly and increasing their capacity as they start hitting the limits of their configuration today,” he says.

Subramanian, who has been involved in the data storage industry for over 20 years, says he’s seen a lot of storage waves come and go with regards to the expansion of internet-connected devices in general, however; the “stickiness” aspect of body-worn surveillance is different.

“I think this is something that is going to be around for a long time – both from the perspective of the public and police – because having a body cam is becoming more of a necessity than a nice to have,” he says. “Most of the counties and police and sheriffs’ departments we talk to are facing a huge problem in terms of data growth that is driven by 1) the number of body cams that are having to deploy and 2) the fact that many of these body cams are generating higher resolution video.”  

Another challenge facing law enforcement is the length of time they are required to retain video, which can vary greatly from agency to agency and the on circumstances surrounding various incidents. And while more and more police and sheriffs’ departments are able to obtain the funding necessary for cameras, Subramanian says they’re not necessarily allocating enough for the backend infrastructure they need to support these deployments.

“People have to keep this video for many months and, in some cases, even years,” Subramanian adds. “If you look at the overall purchase cycle and budget allocated for (storage), most of the time the IT department has the budget for cameras but not all of the infrastructure that goes along with it. So, if someone were to buy a $500 body cam, the amount of storage that is needed on the backend in order to store all of this is about $500 or more per year for the body cam. And if you think about a department with many officers, just multiply that by the number of body cams and it becomes astronomical.”

Without a way to accurately assess how much storage they actually need given how the number and types of cameras themselves can change along with evolving retention polices, Subramanian says it is paramount law enforcement agencies deploy a storage solution that gives them flexibility.

With StorageCraft for Law Enforcement, police departments can start with 10 terabytes (TB) of storage and scale up to petabytes in the same cluster. They can also add any number of drives, anytime and in any granularity to meet their storage requirements. Additionally, when they do expand their available storage capacity, there is no configuration required nor is there any application downtime.

“What we offer is pretty good balance between an on-premises solution and the pay as you go (cloud) model… so many of these department can actually start with one or two boxes and as their need for capacity grows, they can keep adding more and more on the fly without doing any forklift upgrades or changing the applications for any of the other infrastructure that goes along with it,” he says. “That is the scalability we offer in this solution.”

Subramanian says StorageCraft plans to go to market through value added resellers (VARs) in the security channel. An entry-level configuration costs less than $17,000 including 96TB of storage. The StorageCraft solution can also be installed and available in less than fifteen minutes.

StorageCraft for Law Enforcement is already deployed at several law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S., including the Camden County Prosecutor's Office in New Jersey.

About the Author:

Joel Griffin is the Editor-in-Chief of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].