Long term retention of Video Surveillance with HPE StoreEver Archive Manager Solution

One year appears to be the new norm for minimum retention; however, organizations now face tremendous pressure to retain data for even longer periods of time, in an economic manner. As legal and regulatory requirements bump up retention requirements, camera resolution and number of cameras increase as well.

To make long-term storage affordable, security integrators are sometimes forced to make compromises for their clients - including reduced retention, lower resolution, storing only a single copy of critical video and in worst cases, deleting video to make space for new incoming video. But as we know, the value of video surveillance and monitoring (vSAM) footage is often unrecognized until the point where it is needed for legal purposes to protect organizations from potential litigation or in the prosecution of crimes. The premature erasure of information that becomes important later could pose future challenges for any organization. The corollary of legal and regulatory requirements that drive the need for more capacity are more affordable storage architectures to lower the cost of long-term data retention and to enable business analytics.

Historically, accessing and sharing video footage on tape has not always been as uncomplicated as disk. All of that has now changed. The HPE StoreEver Archive Manager Software solution integrates into Milestone XProtect workflow by creating an archive of infrequently-accessed footage onto cost-effective tape by moving data from primary storage to reliable HPE StoreEver LTO Tape Libraries. HPE StoreEver Archive Manager enables easy and fast access to the footages stored on the tape like a disk drive. It allows the creation of a tape archive by virtualizing one or more LTO Tape Libraries and presenting the archive as a network share or mount point.

The multi-tiered storage solution from HPE and Milestone will automatically and transparently move data to the most appropriate tier of storage at the right time, providing a powerful combination of high performance and lowest total cost of ownership.

The retention requirements are handled easily by purchasing only additional LTO tapes so that customers can ‘pay as they grow’ by simply purchasing additional offline media as capacity expands. In contrast, the traditional hard disk only solution requires the purchase of additional disk-based storage units as well as the media. The HPE tape automation portfolio scales from simple eight slot autoloaders, through industry leading, MSL6480 midrange tape libraries (up to 8.4 PB), right up to Enterprise class libraries. These HPE tape automation solutions enable customers to easily and cost effectively archive vast quantities of data and seamlessly add capacity as required.

When it comes to long-term archiving, storage managers have to think about a lot of factors: equipment, media, maintenance, energy costs and floor space. Since costs for each can be significant, it’s crucial that they maximize data capacity while minimizing recurring costs. Here’s a practical example of how the growing quantity of vSAM data can present challenges.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as part of its program called System Assessment and Validation for Emergency Responders (SAVER) conducted an ‘operationally-oriented assessment of body worn cameras’. The cameras in the SAVER review ranged from 8 GB to 32 GB and could store anything from a maximum of 4 to 35 hours of HD footage. 32 GB is not a lot of itself but consider that the New York police department has about 34,000 uniformed officers. If body cameras were standard issue across every NYPD law enforcement department and each officer captured just 1 hour of HD footage every day, the storage requirement would be colossal. Without getting into compression codecs and formats, if we assume five minutes of HD 1080i footage is about 1 GB, then a single hour of filming throughout a shift might generate 15 GB of data. And that would soon multiply. For example:

34,000 officers
1 hour or 15 GB footage per day
5 days per week = 60 GB per officer
2.04 PB of data for the entire NYPD in a single working week

The Clipper Group found that the average disk-based solution costs 26x the total cost of ownership for an average tape-based solution, as the energy costs to spin the disks exceed that for tape. Disk isn’t a space-saver either, as they also found that a disk-based storage facility uses 4x the amount of floor space than that of tape. Their overall conclusion was that the more data that can be preserved on tape, the lower the overall total cost of ownership. Consuming zero energy on the shelf, LTO tape offers the most energy-efficient and cost-effective method for storing your data.

Contact us today to inquire about LTO-7 Tape Libraries and discuss your storage needs. - 866 801 2944