Tape and VMS: choose HPE StoreEver when you need to keep a close eye on your long term storage budget

It’s impossible to understand the business case and use requirement for tape without a broader understanding of the storage landscape in which the technology exists. Tape is just one of many storage options that businesses and organisations can turn to in order protect and store their data. So what is it about magnetic tape that continues to make it so useful and enduring?

In a new series of blog posts, I am looking at use cases for tape in a number of vertical industries, continuing with Video Surveillance Management Systems.

By 2027, IDC predicts that data generated by computer vision devices, including video surveillance, is expected to make up almost 50% of the total number of exabytes in the Datasphere[i]. This is largely due to the increasing adoption of smart camera systems and analytical software that enables them to be utilised in a variety of roles beyond simple surveillance.

The next gen cameras that are driving the growth to 2027 will increasingly deliver HD and Ultra HD (4K) images of astonishing detail and clarity. In turn, this is opening up a wealth of new applications that can be managed by artificial intelligence systems: for example, monitoring industrial equipment, providing security and (more controversially) real-time facial recognition.

According to industry experts, however the average frame rate used for capturing security video is only 6 frames per second (fps) even though UHD devices are capable of capturing images at 30fps and even 60fps. Higher frame rates mean greater detail and enhanced clarity, increasing the likelihood of cameras capturing more relevant and useful information. So why are users routinely choosing a lower available resolution setting when the camera is capable of higher resolution video?

The answer is all related to traditional storage architectures for video surveillance, which have traditionally been based on cheap, relatively low cost servers and disk arrays. A single hour of RAW 4K video footage produced by just one camera consumes approximately 110 GB of disk capacity. Scale this by thousands of hours and hundreds of cameras, and it’s clear that video surveillance applications will require colossal amounts of storage, not just for the primary purpose of storing the original footage, but also for backing up and archiving that material.

The experience of law enforcement agencies offers an interesting real life example of some of the challenges that tape can address. When a Canadian police department unrolled its pilot program for bodycams, those first 50 cameras produced more than 18 GB of data per shift. In its final phase, the program would deploy more than 1,500 cameras, promising to create a combined petabyte of data each day. By deploying an active archive topology built upon a mix of disk and tape, the service was able to ingest all the body cam footage into a higher performance array for short term retention and then, after a pre-defined period of thirty days, egress the older footage to tape for long term storage and retention.

If a surveillance system is producing terabytes of data on a daily basis, then organisations may find that the cost of storing all this information on-prem, either on a disk array or object storage device, or in the cloud, can soon become prohibitively expensive. At some point, they may face the same traditional consideration of when to begin deleting information to free up storage capacity for new footage. And in some cases, this “pressure to erase” may conflict with either business goals (creating value from the archive footage) or regulatory goals (being obliged to retain footage for a pre-determined period).

With an archival shelf life of up to 30 years, modern tape cartridges are manufactured to resist the degradation and oxide breakdown that was common with consumer formats like VHS and audio tape. Tape drives also have error correction technology which makes sure that any data that is written is verified and, if necessary, rewritten to ensure perfect copies are made. Compared to a conventional hard disk, tapes are portable by design and very easy to move on and offsite between a business location and a secure offsite vault.? Once there, they require no power and fairly normal storage conditions in terms of cooling and humidity.

A single LTO-9 18 TB cartridge can hold approximately 8-9 months of HD video surveillance footage recorded at 30fps in 1280 x 1024 resolution using H.264 compression, the equivalent of approximately 64 GB of data per day. In comparison users can only fit around 14 days of such material on a comparatively priced 1 TB HDD.

And of course, tape can be deployed in automated tape libraries with multiple drives: a typical midrange tape library system can stream terabytes of data per hour and is ideally suited to the larger file contiguous file sizes generated by surveillance systems.

The key enabler of LTO becoming an industry standard in the broadcast world was a feature called Linear Tape File System, or LTFS. LTFS enables users to mount their tape device like any external disk volume and view the contents using their standard Windows, Mac or Linux file system. Likewise, intelligent video management software (VMS) solutions can keep track of all recorded footage, regardless of whether it lives on disk or tape, and use the flexibility of LTFS to recover content quickly and easily from those deeper tape archives. This is a very similar setup to the active archiving topologies that I have described in other articles.

Obviously, with video surveillance footage, there are very strong regulatory and compliance factors relating to data security and privacy. Using LTO tape technology, for example, a HPE StoreEver LTO tape drive itself can encrypt data as it’s written using secure AES-256 algorithms, so that even if data tapes were to get lost or stolen, nobody would be able to view the content.

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[i] Source: IDC Worldwide Global DataSphere IoT Device Installed Base and Data Generated Forecast, 2023–2027