Vertical Focus: Video Surveillance

From securing the U.S.-Mexican border to searching city streets for possible terrorist threats, video surveillance is shaping up to be a massive consumer of storage this year. With IBM throwing down a rumored $350 million for digital storage specialist XIV earlier this week, and Samsung unveiling a surveillance-specific hard-drive, the storage industry is gearing up for a flood of image-based data.

Here are some of the key surveillance areas to keep an eye on during 2008:

Border Security

Arguably the highest profile, and most controversial, surveillance project underway in the U.S. is the Secure Border Initiative (SBI), an ambitious Department of Homeland Security project to lock down the country's borders.

Boeing, which is better known as an aircraft manufacturer, was awarded the 2006 contract to build the SBI technology infrastructure in a deal said to be worth an initial $2 billion, rising to $8 billion.At almost 6,000 miles, the U.S. has some of the longest land borders in the world, making SBI potentially one of the biggest surveillance projects around. Boeing's program, called SBInet, will generate vast amounts of image data for tackling illegal immigrants, criminal activity, and potential terrorist threats north and south.

"We're integrating all the off-the-shelf systems for the northern and southern borders," says Boeing spokesman Robert Villanueva. "It's high-volume storage."

As well as data from surveillance cameras, the SBInet project also uses data from sensors to detect movement in border areas. This information is then used to alert Border Patrol officers or federal agents.

Boeing was unable to reveal how the storage infrastructure supporting SBInet will work, or how much data it will generate, although the firm is partnering with a slew of other vendors on the project. These include Perot Systems and the public sector division of Unisys, which is providing the IT infrastructure for SBInet.

It is still early days for the rollout of SBInet, and the first pilot phase of the project across 28 miles of the Sonoran desert outside of Tucson, Ariz., is still being evaluated.As the U.S. enters an election year, both homeland security and defense are high on the national agenda, ensuring an explosion in storage-intensive video surveillance efforts.

Watch this space...

Municipal Security

Probably the best known example of municipal video surveillance in the world is in London, where more than half a million cameras have been deployed to fight terrorism and support the U.K. capital's congestion charge.

Faced with the stark realities of the post-9/11 world, U.S. cities are now ramping up their own video surveillance efforts."You think of federal government doing video surveillance, but I think that the bigger opportunity is local government," says John Webster, senior analyst at the Data Mobility Group.

Despite some ongoing squabbles over privacy issues, U.S. cities from Chicago to Long Beach, Calif., are rushing to deploy storage systems capable of handling feeds from hundreds or even thousands of video cameras.

"We're seeing a big surge in municipal safety -- since 9/11 there were a lot of policy changes made," says Bud Broomhead, CEO of vendor Intransa. This can be traced back to late 2001, when the White House began issuing the Homeland Security Presidential Directives (HSPDs), which aim to establish policies to identify and protect potential terrorist targets.

"Budgets around implementing these things have started to hit," adds Broomhead, although the exec would not reveal which U.S. cities Intransa is working with. Rival Pivot 3 was somewhat more forthcoming, and the vendor is currently working with the city of Long Beach as part of a major roll-out of surveillance cameras.

Under the terms of the recently announced deal, the city will deploy over a hundred Terabytes worth of Pivot3's RAIGE iSCSI hardware, which serves as a central storage hub for video data. Long Beach is also using a specialist software vendor called Video Net to catalog and manage the data stored on the RAIGE devices.With the city of Long Beach's cameras sending data at a rate of six to eight frames per second, bandwidth is a key factor in the storage deployment. "You have to have enough capacity, and you also need a lot of bandwidth so that the storage can ingest the video streams as they are coming in," says Jeff Bell, Pivot3's vice president of marketing, highlighting the vendor's use of memory caching to boost its IO performance.

It's not just American cities that are driving massive video data growth. Intransa's Broomhead told Byte and Switch that two of his firm's biggest customers are in Latin America. The vendor is also involved in a project called 'Peaceful City', which is a Chinese government initiative to put video surveillance in the country's second tier cities.

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Gaming

"Individual casino projects are driving upwards of a Pbyte of storage," says Pivot3's Bell, explaining that the big-name casinos of Vegas and Atlantic City, N.J., are just the tip of the iceberg. "Think of Indian gaming -- there's hundreds and hundreds of those casinos now."Pivot3 has only one publicly announced customer in the gaming industry, the 101 Casino in northern California, although Bell told Byte and Switch that the vendor is in discussions with "dozens" of other sites.

A combination of fraud prevention and gaming industry regulations is apparently forcing U.S. casinos to deploy complex surveillance systems, which in turn will generate vast volumes of data. "Some of the casinos are putting in projects that are hundreds of terabytes, approaching a petabyte," says Bell. "There's a whole ecosystem around this."

The exec explains that specialist systems that use video cameras to visually count cards and find out when someone is cheating have already been developed. To support this effort, he says, many casinos are deploying high-definition mega-pixel cameras, which is also driving their storage needs.

Enterprises

A number of enterprise markets are also starting to emerge for cutting-edge video surveillance. Examples of this are retail and the manufacturing sector, where firms have started using the video technology for quality control. "Manufacturers want to examine products for defects," says Data Mobility Group's Webster, explaining that this is much more accurate than relying on the human eye.As this market starts to develop, specialist vendors such as Cognex have already started to appear. The Natick, Mass.-based vendor has developed video recognition devices for checking products as they pass along a production line.

Last month the firm signed a contract with an unnamed Chinese packaging firm to check cartons and other consumer packaging materials for defects such as missing seals and printing errors. This came just a few months after Cognex signed a similar deal with a Japanese robot manufacturer.

Retailers are also starting to get in on the video surveillance act, potentially generating vast amounts of data. "In retail environments they are connecting point-of-sale transaction systems to video," says Intransa's Broomhead, explaining that this can check that the correct items are actually being swiped through the checkout.

This can be used to avoid thefts when thieves switch bar codes on products or even use fake bar codes, according to the exec. "Retailers can call up the video to see what is really transpiring, explains Broomhead. "Is that a loaf of bread that is being swiped or is that an iPod?"

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