431 Petabytes - all in the name of safety and security

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Deploying video as a means to provide public and private safety and security is nothing new. What is new is the incredible capabilities of cameras, software, and yes, storage that is bringing video security to the next level.

StorageNewsletter.com covers the latest IHS research report indicating the massive growth in data generated by security cameras alone. IHS reports that security cameras produce 451 Petabytes, that’s 451,000 Terabytes of data every day! To put that into perspective, StorageNewsletter paints a nice picture:

“It’s enough to fill 92.1 million single-sided, single-layer DVDs.
It’s four times the amount of photo and video data stored on Facebook as of February 2012.
It is also equal to the information produced in just one day by all the new video cameras installed worldwide in 2013.”

Triggered by an influx of high definition video cameras on the market, the petabyte demand is expected to reach 859PB in 2017. For more details on the IHS report, check out StorageNewsletter’s summary here.

When I first saw this number, I immediately was brought back to my original days at Seagate. I joined Seagate in 2006 to help develop our market strategy for the video security segment. I lived and breathed it every day for 3 years. Of course things change, as do opportunities, hence my latest focus on cloud, yet another storage rich segment of the market. I still miss covering the security market, but the good news is that security and cloud are indeed intersecting, but we’ll talk about that in a future post.

For now, let’s flashback to the past and reminisce a bit to see how much the video security space has grown. When we were first sizing the market way back when, the total capacity demand for video security was projected to be 692 Petabytes in 2007 and 2,549 Petabytes in 2011. Shocking, those numbers (according to IMS research) were on an annual basis, so broken down per day (assuming 365 days per year of recording), we were storing 1.9 Petabytes per day in 2007, and 6.7 Petabytes per day in 2011.

Compared to the 431 Petabytes per day in 2013…that’s 226x more than 2007, and 64x more than 2011! But wait, is the 431PB number the actual amount of video stored? Probably not given the language states that cameras are generating 431 PB of data per day…I assume given the advancements in real time video analytics, it’s not all being stored. But think about this, even if only 10% was being stored, that’s 15,731 PB or 15 Exabytes of storage per year. A far cry from my early days of 692 Petabytes.

When it comes to the safety and security of both the public, and our own private property, the technology that is making it possible is light years ahead of what it was just 7 short years ago. And, when you think about it, there is one technology that has enabled security companies to innovate, to bring new video security products to market, and that’s high capacity, low cost, reliable disk based storage. Without it, we may still be looking at video tapes.