Enterprise Storage Manager. Managing Video As A Strategic Asset November 2009

Transcription

1 Enterprise Storage Manager Managing Video As A Strategic Asset November 2009

2 Table of Contents About Verint Video Intelligence Solutions... 1 About Verint Systems... 1 Preface: The Significance of Video Storage... 2 Verint s Enterprise Storage Manager... 3 Managing Video as a Strategic Organizational Asset... 3 Reliability and Availability... 4 Scalability and Cost Effectiveness... 5 Interoperability, Quality, and Manageability... 6 An Illustration of Centralized Disk Storage with ESM... 7 Unauthorized use, duplication, or modification of this document in whole or in part without the written consent of Verint Systems Inc. is strictly prohibited. By providing this document, Verint Systems Inc. is not making any representations regarding the correctness or completeness of its contents and reserves the right to alter this document at any time without notice. Features listed in this document are subject to change. Please contact Verint for current product features and specifications. All marks referenced herein with the or TM symbol are registered trademarks or trademarks of Verint Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries. All rights reserved. All other marks are trademarks of their respective owners Verint Systems Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.

3 About Verint Video Intelligence Solutions Verint Video Intelligence Solutions is the leading global provider of networked video solutions that enhance the security of people, property and assets. Verint s award-winning Nextiva portfolio includes video management software, integrated analytics, encoders and IP cameras, and intelligent DVRs for use in a variety of vertical market environments. Open, standards based and IT friendly, Verint solutions help organizations leverage their existing video investments and place IP video within the reach of virtually every organization. About Verint Systems Verint Systems Inc. is a leading provider of Actionable Intelligence solutions for an optimized enterprise and a safer world. More than 10,000 organizations in over 150 countries rely on Verint solutions to perform more effectively, build competitive advantage, and enhance the security of people, facilities, and infrastructure. Page 1

4 Preface: The Significance of Video Storage With the advent of advanced video capture and analytic technologies, many organizations have come to realize that video can be instrumental in achieving strategic objectives. Video images are a rich source of actionable intelligence the timely information that organizations need to address security exposures, reduce liability and loss, meet regulatory requirements, leverage market opportunities, and improve workforce performance. However, the ability to derive value from video depends not just on the ability to capture video images, but on the capabilities to retain video for ongoing use and retrieve video on demand, wherever and whenever it is needed. It follows that the storage an organization selects shapes the value that the organization receives. It also follows that using proven storage solutions from leaders in storage technology can substantially increase the return on investment in both video surveillance and storage infrastructure. This executive brief explores how Verint s Enterprise Storage Manager enables organizations to store their video like any other organizational data, using best-of-breed storage solutions and policy-based video management for long-term value and enhanced ROI. Page 2

5 Verint s Enterprise Storage Manager Managing Video as a Strategic Organizational Asset Having established video as a strategic organizational asset, we can now explore how Verint s Enterprise Storage Manager (ESM) addresses five key aspects of enterprise asset management as they pertain to video storage. i Reliability Ensure that video will be retained as mandated by organizational policies and industry requirements. Availability Ensure that video data is available as needed. Scalability and Cost Effectiveness Grow the infrastructure to meet evolving needs by leveraging existing investments. Interoperability Operate seamlessly on heterogeneous storage platforms and with best-of-breed business and security solutions, for continual return on investment. Quality and Manageability Institute intelligent, policy-driven storage management of video, for high productivity and optimum use of IT resources. Although it is impossible to plan for every contingency, good business practice demands planning, and managing storage as a business resource is no exception. Forrester Research 1 Page 3

6 Reliability and Availability Video is increasingly viewed as critical organizational data, and critical data must be available on demand. This is especially true in the regulatory arena, where legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act has expanded identification and reporting requirements in industries from finance and banking to gaming and retail. ii Additionally, video enriched with data from security, Point Of Sale (POS), and other business systems provides a complete and contextual record of events that can strengthen an organization s ability to manage disputes, liability, and loss. Finally, organizations can leverage surveillance video for performance and market intelligence to help them perform more effectively and maintain their competitive edge. Organizations that understand the business-critical value of video are often reluctant to risk its storage on white box PCs, preferring to use more reliable centralized RAID configurations from industry-leading storage vendors. RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks retains video data on multiple storage devices. RAID can thus improve performance (the speed with which data is retrieved), increase Mean Time Between Failure, and provide fault tolerance (data remains available even if one system component fails). Verint s Enterprise Storage Manager enables organizations to choose the types of storage that best meet their needs from vendors who offer the most value. Organizations can store video using their existing storage infrastructures and can manage video Video is increasingly viewed as critical data, and critical data must be available on demand. ESM increases data availability by leveraging existing storage infrastructures and best-of-breed storage solutions. storage using their existing data storage policies just as they would manage any other data. Policybased storage management tends to be more reliable and consistent with the organization s overall goals than storage management built on the requirements of proprietary, closed recording systems. ESM can store data online, using RAID technology, for short-term retention (such as on the local hard drive of the recorder) and in a central storage repository for longer periods. This redundancy significantly reduces the chance of data loss and helps ensure that data is available, even in the event of equipment failure. If a local drive is unavailable, ESM automatically queries the central storage repository without user intervention or a system administrator. Users can access video data anytime and anywhere, transparently that is, without knowing where the video is stored. And while many proprietary video storage systems require storage to be co-located with the recording, ESM permits the central repository to reside anywhere on the organization s Local or Wide Area Network (LAN/WAN), for greater architectural flexibility and more cost-effective storage maintenance. Page 4

7 Scalability and Cost Effectiveness As the ability to capture critical data increases, so do enterprise storage requirements. Additionally, business conditions may require increasing camera inputs, retention times, or frame rate per second (fps) changes that can significantly boost storage needs. iii Today, storage accounts for 12-15% of the average IT budget, and enterprise storage capacities are projected to grow 40-60% annually through iv Storage is a serious cost consideration, and the ability to cost effectively build and grow a storage infrastructure is crucial to the organization s bottom line. Leveraging Industry-Standard Technologies and Existing Storage Infrastructures By enabling video to be stored using industry-standard storage technologies, Verint s Enterprise Storage Manager helps CIOs, asset managers, data center managers, and business managers should be aware of the total cost of ownership figures for their storage systems. Storage is a significant and increasing cost item. Gartner 3 organizations realize greater value from their enterprise storage systems, and eliminates the costs and uncertainties of proprietary storage from vendors whose expertise lies in video recording, rather than storage. Scaling Storage Systems To Meet Growing Demand ESM helps organizations scale their storage systems to meet new challenges and accommodate everincreasing volumes of video data. There is no need to retrofit larger hard drives onto white box PCs or add expensive direct-attached disk subsystems directly to recorders in order to expand storage capacity; with ESM, organizations can simply add disk storage to the central storage subsystem. ESM also allows all cameras to share a single storage pool; users can increase retention just by adding disk drives. And ESM enables organizations to manage storage on a per-camera basis, assigning specific retention periods by camera. For example, casinos can assign longer retention periods to video from cameras focused on gaming tables than to video from cameras in back-office hallways. Retailers can assign shorter retention to video from cameras in parking lots than to video from cameras focused on Point-Of- Sale systems. ESM s advanced grooming algorithms determine the data to be retained or deleted, so that the system never runs out of storage space. Users can configure the system to store video for preset periods of time (provided that there is enough disk space to accommodate the request). Plus, ESM automatically saves recently-viewed video images longer than video not recently accessed, saving the most important video for later use. With ESM, organizations can also reduce their long-term storage requirements by electing to store only significant event video (access control violations, contact alarm inputs, motion alarms, behavior alarms, etc.) on the centralized disk. Page 5

8 Interoperability, Quality, and Manageability Integrating For Seamless Operation in the Working Environment Verint s Total Access Partner Program and open, standards-based architecture facilitate integration with existing IT infrastructures and video surveillance networks for seamless operation within the organization s working environment. Verint s Enterprise Storage Manager has been tested for interoperability with solutions from such leading storage vendors as IBM, EMC, and StorageTek. The Total Access Partner Program facilitates integration with storage solutions, access control systems, IP cameras, video analytics, and other best-of-breed products. The Verint Software Development Kit (SDK) provides direct access to Verint s Networked Video framework, offering certified interoperability for faster deployment and lower cost of ownership. Also, the data storage industry is constantly changing. Disk drive capacities continue to increase dramatically, and new storage products are regularly introduced. ESM utilizes standard file formats, enabling organizations to leverage new storage technologies, strategies, and connectivity choices for long-term value. v "At the end of the day, the best way to ensure interoperation between technologies is by adhering to an open standards process If a new technology doesn't want to be standardized, it should prove why." Tim Bray in TechRepublic 5 Meeting The Organization s Needs ESM enables organizations to manage and retain video according to enterprise needs, rather than according to the limitations of proprietary storage devices. For example, a traditional Digital Video System might be able to retain video from high-motion cameras connected to the video recorder for only 5 days and video from low-motion cameras for as long as 25 days. The problem with this approach is it ignores the requirements of the organization and instead determines retention on the basis of motion. ESM enables organizations to retain video for as long as they need it and only for as long as they need it without the cost of unnecessary storage or the risks of video that has been discarded too soon. ESM enables organizations to optimize storage use to meet retention requirements and to do so without wasting valuable disk space. ESM enables disk storage to be shared among a large number of high- and low-motion cameras via storage pools. ESM s dynamic storage pooling treats multiple storage devices as a single, centrally-managed storage space. Data is dynamically stored wherever space is available, rather than require users to map data to specific storage devices. ESM thus automatically provides exactly the amount of storage needed. ESM simplifies storage management, automatically adjusting for varying video streams and automatically managing bandwidth. For example, if the central disk storage pool is unavailable for a period of time and then comes back online, ESM sends the data to central storage at a faster rate in order to catch up. ESM moves data in and out of the Digital Video Server at a controlled pace, without excessive network bandwidth usage or an excessive burden on the Digital Video Server. ESM preserves Server resources, enabling the Server to display live video and video playback requests while ESM copies video files. Page 6

9 An Illustration of Centralized Disk Storage with ESM This graphic depicts how the Verint Enterprise Storage Manager might be used within a typical storage infrastructure. Analog video signals are collected at the analog camera. Then, the encoder digitizes and compresses these signals. The compressed video signal is sent to the Video Recorder over the LAN using TCP/IP. Then, compressed, digitized video is simultaneously written onto the RAID on the Video Recorder and sent back over the LAN to the Storage Server, where it is written onto a centralized disk array. When live video is requested from the Review Workstation, it can come from either the encoder or the video recorder. In either case, delay in delivering the video is minimal. When recorded video is requested from the Review Workstation, the ESM software makes the determination whether to send data from the centralized disk array or from the RAID on the Video Recorder. Page 7

10 Conclusion The value that video brings to an organization is in large part determined by the way that video is stored. Best-of-breed storage solutions that address the organization s overall storage requirements enhance its ability to retain and retrieve mission-critical video data in line with enterprise security and records management policies. Verint Networked Video Solutions enable organizations to acquire, manage, and use video like any other enterprise data. Verint s Enterprise Storage Manager enhances storage utilization and video data security, simplifies video data management, and leverages existing infrastructures and industry-standard technologies for lower cost of ownership and long-term investment protection. For more information, contact us at or VideoSales@Verint.com. Endnotes i Forrester Research, Best Practice: Develop a Storage Strategy, January ii CIO Magazine, What To Do When Uncle Sam Wants Your Data, April 2003; also, Casino Enterprise Management, Reviewing Current Anti-Money Laundering Requirements, June 2004 iii Gartner, Management Update: Storage Management TCO Considerations, September iv CIO Magazine, Storage Demands Persist, February v TechRepublic, When Standards Don t Apply, June Page 8