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July 2016 www.SecurityInfoWatch.com / Security Dealer & Integrator 53 packages with analytics capabilities are important developments, but each creates new data that must be stored. As the volume of video data grows, so does the challenge to store it. e time has come to address this as an industry, to look to new tech- nologies, and to evolve as media and entertainment did to serve our orga- nizations and our customers more efficiently than ever. With these chal- lenges in mind, here are a few video surveillance storage trends to watch: New Laws and Requirements In addition to a general increase in capacity needs, there are two types of new laws and regulations leading to the expansion of video surveillance data in the market. e first type of law mandates the creation of video surveillance data. A good example is a recent Texas law that requires schools and spe- cial education centers to record video throughout their facilities. ese laws create a substantial amount of data and a new storage need that did not previously exist. e second type of law mandates retention of video surveillance data for a length of time. e Cruise Ves- sel Security and Safety Act (CVSSA) of 2010, for example, requires the cruise line industry keep video data for a minimum of 120 days. Financial institutions and ATMs have a 180- day retention requirement, along with retail and grocery stores, which must also retain their surveillance video due to potential legal obligations. Police departments must retain surveillance videos from interview and interrogation rooms for a dura- tion longer than 999 days. In military detention centers, videos are retained for up to seven years. ese requirements protect orga- nizations in the event of a law- suit, enabling them to build a case with video surveillance data on file, and to protect the public in case of incident; however, they also dramati- cally increase an organization's need for and cost of storage. To ensure new laws and retention requirements help instead of hurt, integrators and dealers must offer affordable storage solutions designed specifically for video. New Technologies for Video Storage ere are two kinds of data in a tra- ditional IT space: structured and unstructured. Structured data, like a database, has specific formats and pat- terns. Current IT storage technologies are designed for structured data man- agement. Video, however, is unstruc- tured data, made up of innumerable, unique pixels with no format or pat- tern; and thus there is no way to use metadata to reduce the size of video data sets. Storage solutions that work well in common IT environments do not translate well to video surveillance. With video surveillance, scalabil- ity and cost are persistent issues. To compensate, organizations are reduc- ing the amount of video data created by skimping where they can — they buy 1080P cameras but run them at 720P. ey want full motion with 30 frames per second but settle for 5 to 10. Percentage of motion suffers as organizations shoot for 50 percent and end up doing less. e result is low quality, grainy video, frame skipping and lag. Back-end storage technol- ogy drives these decisions, rather than quality, safety or even ROI. is is clearly a case of "tail wagging the dog." e question should not be "what is your video retention requirement," but instead, "what would you like your retention policy to be?" To address this, we need a different kind of storage technology for video surveillance, and this evolution has happened at least once in the past. e industry is going through the same technology shi that the media and entertainment business did a decade ago, when media and entertainment looked at shelves of analog film reels and decided it needed two forms of storage to manage the practicality and cost of storing unstructured data. Today, the industry keeps a small percentage of data on spinning disk for round-the-clock access and archives data to digital tape as a more afford- able, dense form of storage. Diversifying storage mediums with a central access point is the ideal infrastructure for video surveillance, enabling customization to an organiza- tion's unique needs, requirements and frequency of access. A starting point might be Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) disk, a technology specifically designed to handle large file types and sequential data. SMR disk is highly scalable in both capacity and perfor- mance to accommodate additional cameras and retention requirements, and provides long term IP video data storage at the cost of tape. SMR coupled with a tape system can enable customers with large video retention requirements to keep costs down while maintaining a tiered infra- structure for data preservation. Diversifying storage mediums with a central access point is the ideal infrastructure for video surveillance , enabling customization to an organization's unique needs, requirements and frequency of access.