With digital video on the rise in enterprises, storage teams will play a key role in accommodating the petabytes of data that can be generated by video surveillance systems.

With the high cost of digital video surveillance systems falling, organisations can now buy additional IP video technology and do much more with video surveillance data. In addition to combating fraud and crime, companies are applying analytics to video data to aid merchandising, operations and customer service. "The advent of IP video is one of the key things that changed surveillance video from a sleepy technology backwater to something that IT needs to get involved in," says Steven Norall, senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group.

Industry researcher Frost & Sullivan sees IP as the next phase for the surveillance industry and one that will have a far-reaching impact on storage. According to company research, "the most important advantage in an IP surveillance network is the capability of storing large quantities of video footage in a relatively limited storage space with much higher image quality than analog networks."

"Companies doing surveillance are generating a lot more data, 24/7. The data is increasingly high resolution. Now they want to see a recognisable face," says Rick Bentley, CEO at video surveillance system integrator Connexed Technologies.

IP video

The IP video surveillance storage market is on a steady growth track. Garnering $US767 million in revenue in 2003, the market is projected to reach $US1.7 billion in 2008 and top $US2.9 billion by 2013, according to Frost & Sullivan.

"Storage stands to receive a large chunk of that money, currently about 25%," reports Dilip Sarangan, research analyst in the North America AutoID and Security Practice at Frost & Sullivan. "Storage is the largest and most expensive component in a video surveillance system."

As soon as the video surveillance stream has been digitized and directed across a network, companies can implement shared, scalable network storage instead of being limited to the storage typically attached to each digital video recorder (DVR). "DVRs create islands of storage," says Lee Caswell, chief strategy officer and founder of Pivot3. Islands of video storage suffer from the same inefficiencies and unnecessary management overhead as the islands of data storage that drove enterprises to implement SAN and NAS to consolidate their storage.

Of course, companies don't need the latest IP video cameras to take advantage of digitized video. "Companies still use a lot of analog cameras," says Caswell. "They aren't going to replace those cameras that fast because today there is still about a $250 price delta between an IP camera and a conventional video camera." By using an encoder, companies can capture and digitize the incoming analog video data stream before shipping it over a LAN to networked storage.

The importance of IP video can be seen in the arrival of a new class of video product, the network video recorder (NVR), which captures data feeds from multiple cameras for storage on directly attached disks. "The NVR is like the old DVR except that it attaches to the network. You can log in remotely and access data or manage it over the network," says Bentley.