To The Rescue
Surveillance footage will reveal the truth
- By Matt Rutledge
- Sep 01, 2016
Jim Short can’t name names, but one of
his NVR clients is a Los Angeles hotel
brimming with $3,000 a night suites, and
a parking garage stocked with vehicles
that most of us only dream of owning.
One day, a customer stormed into the lobby raging
that his car had been keyed—a clear, glaring defacement
of his prized paint job. Long story short, the hotel
manager tried to pull up the garage’s surveillance
footage and found … nothing.
More embarrassingly, the third-party hard drive
containing the footage was not operational. The hotel
manager sent the drive off for forensic data recovery,
incurring well over $1,000 in costs, only to discover that
the drive had suffered a failure a month before the event.
Had they turned on the NUUO “Health Monitoring,”
he might have discovered the malfunction almost immediately.
The moral of this story highlights the importance
of drive reliability, and a system to check on drive
performance.
To create a better NVR solution for the hotel and
hundreds of other customers, Short, the new business
development manager for surveillance solution provider
NUUO, had to delve into the heart of its product
line and find a better way to safeguard the customers’
data. At the same time, he had to address another
major business problem his company was facing from
third-party drives.
As customers increasingly show an insatiable hunger
for terabytes of storage, NUUO had begun to see
a rapid uptick in customers buying NVRs with no
surveillance-class hard drives pre-installed. NUUO
couldn’t compete with big third-party e-tailers on volume,
and by mid-2015, NUUO’s monthly hard drive
sales had flat lined and was heading for zero.
THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING
DRIVE SALES
There are numerous reasons behind this growing appetite
for more storage. The global video surveillance
space is experiencing a 22 percent CAGR, according
to Research and Markets in its recent report “Global
Video Surveillance Market 2016-2020,” which also
pegs wireless connectivity as a key driver behind
growth, particularly in locations where network infrastructure
may be sparse.
Another key trend is that the average resolution
of IP surveillance cameras keeps creeping higher, observed
HIS Technology in its “Video Surveillance Intelligence
Service—August 2015” report[JAJ1]. The typical
640x480 streams of a decade ago have given way to
megapixel feeds, with 4K cameras now gaining steam in
high-end deployments.
NUUO offers NVRs ranging from a single-drive,
eight-stream “Solo” model up through the 2U rackmounted
surveillance-class “Crystal” system with
550 Mb/s of recording throughput. Data growth and
resolution continually push NVR models to feature
faster components; however, speed isn’t always the
key metric. Data retention policies continue to explode,
fueled primarily by demands from insurance
providers, Short said.
“Just five years ago, a shopping mall application
with maybe 300 cameras only required 30 to 90 days
of surveillance storage,” Short said. “Nowadays, those
same malls have requested a year’s worth of storage
capability. One reason is because in the event of a slip
and fall accident, injured parties have up to 12 months
to file a claim against that mall. Furthermore, some
industries require storage for up to two years.”
Combine more cameras with higher resolution/
frame rates and skyrocketing retention times—never
mind that 88 percent of global surveillance users keep
their cameras recording 24 hours a day, according to
Seagate’s 2015 “Video Surveillance Trends Report”—
and that adds up to an explosion in storage capacity
requirements.
With customers often sourcing the cheapest storage
they can find, losses from hard disk sales affect
all NVR manufacturers’ bottom line, but not nearly
as much as the corresponding rise in solution support
costs. These costs, Short notes, are due to customers
calling in about issues with third-party purchased
products. He’d noticed that an increasing number of
drives was failing because integrators were not using
purpose-built surveillance drives, but selecting drives
merely based on price. Many sites also had amassed
large amounts of video storage and needed forensic
data recovery.
Buyers naturally assumed that the
fault rested with the NVR manufacturer,
presenting NUUO with an escalating
dilemma, especially when these installations
did not have NUUO-sold drives:
“Should we support these customers
with problems that may be drive-associated,
and offer a no-charge type of tech
support, as we have in the past?” Short
says. “Or do we change our business
model and offer to support third-party
drives as a paid option? We want to be
the company that provides the best support
for our integrators, but the number
of hours spend troubleshooting problems
not associated with the NVR can
be very time consuming.”
A BETTER DRIVE FOR A BIGGER JOB
Plugging consumer-class hard drives
into business applications is nothing
new. After all, if a 4TB hard drive with
the word “NAS” or “Surveillance” costs
$20 more than one with “Desktop” on
the label, why pay the extra? Behind the
label, though, several answers await,
and they fall into two buckets: construction
and firmware.
While 3.5 inch hard drives adhere to
an industry-standard form factor, interior
design can vary considerably. For
instance, a drive such as Seagate’s Surveillance
HDD uses a higher grade of
heads compared to its Desktop HDD,
which is better suited to 24/7 operation.
Similarly, the platter assembly is more
finely balanced in a higher-end drive.
Such upgrades allow surveillance-class
drives to tolerate higher workloads
without increased risk of failure. The
Seagate Surveillance HDD, for example,
sports a workload rate limit (WRL
- the amount of data traffic a drive is
rated to handle annually) of 180 TB/
year while the Desktop HDD is rated
to manage 55 TB/year.
The ability to handle highly sustained
use is essential in applications
such as surveillance, where high quantities
of traffic may pour non-stop into
drives for months on end.
Furthermore, the ability to handle
rotational vibration (RV) may be one
of the most underrated features of
these surveillance-class drive types.
Sensors mounted to the drive’s circuit
board can detect ambient vibration
forces and take corrective action, for
instance, decreasing RPM speeds. A
slight drop in rotation rate is far more
preferable than heads being jarred
out of alignment, which can result in
failed read/write operations. This leads
to time-wasting data resends and potential
data corruption.
Every hard drive generates some
level of rotational vibration due to the
nature of its motor and operation. The
same is true of fans and other system
components with moving parts. In a
desktop PC, where components tend
to be relatively few and well separated,
RV is rarely a problem. However, in
NAS or surveillance systems, where
several hard drives may be packed
close together in a single drive cage,
RV can pose a severe performance issue,
and even lead to premature drive
failure—as NUUO so often noted.
Firmware plays an important role
in drive performance and extending
reliability. Manufacturers can “tune”
a drive for different workload characteristics.
Whereas a drive in a desktop
PC setting is likely to encounter a mix
of data types and tasks, the overall
load will be light and usually focus on
random reads.
In contrast, surveillance applications
feature sustained, heavy loads
that predominantly comprise write operations.
Optimizing a drive’s firmware
for a certain type of workload improves
the drive’s ability to prioritize and respond
to requests, resulting in faster
response time, and less wear over the
drive’s life.
RELYING ON RESCUE
Offering a higher caliber of hard drive
was an important step forward for
NUUO’s Short, but he knew the company
had to go one step further in enhancing
its value proposition to solve
its business challenges. In the process
of making Seagate Surveillance HDDs
exclusive across NUUO’s product lines,
he learned about Seagate’s recently
launched Rescue service.
Seagate Rescue plans provide hard
drive owners cost-efficient and easy
access to world-class data recovery
services so that in the unlikely event a
drive fails during the coverage period,
the customers do not incur any additional
expenses for recovering their
data1. As our unfortunate Los Angeles
hotel manager found out, forensic
data recovery typically costs hundreds
to thousands of dollars. aWith Seagate
Rescue, all costs are covered.
NUUO opted to provide its customers
with 30 months of rescue coverage
on all of its surveillance HDDs,
absorbing the costs itself. Short anticipates
that the company will more than
recoup this expense in saved support
time and increased sales.
Educating customers about
NUUO’s adoption of Seagate Surveillance
HDDs backed by rescue coverage
can be time consuming, but Short
said that many buyers are taking the
value addition to heart. Since October
2015, NUUO has sold more than 500
Surveillance HDDs, and drive sales
are steadily increasing, as support calls
continue to drop. This is just one more
concern that the Integrator can check
off the list, he said.
“We went back to that hotel manager
and swapped out his drives for Seagate
Surveillance HDDs with Rescue coverage,”
Short said. “We also advised him
on improving his monitoring practices.
In the end, we retained the customer, and
he’s happier now than ever. We’re seeing
that scenario play out over and over
across our client base. When you put the
right product into the right solution, everybody
wins.”
This article originally appeared in the September 2016 issue of Security Today.