14TB SkyHawk Hard Drive Offers Highest Capacity, Unmatched Features for Surveillance Customers and Integrators

  • 14TB SkyHawk Hard Drive Offers Highest Capacity Unmatched Features for Surveillance Customers and Integrators

Seagate has launched its most advanced SkyHawk drive ever — with a new 14TB capacity — offering unparalleled support for security and surveillance applications, as part of a capacity breakthrough across our Guardian family of purpose-built hard drives.

The surveillance industry is rapidly evolving and the demand for higher video resolution, analytics, and longer retention requires much greater storage capacities. Seagate SkyHawk drives provide the optimum combination of performance, high capacity and reliability, the three most important needs for surveillance customers and integrators.

As demand grows for capturing and managing ever larger amounts of video and related metadata, and for deeper and more immediate analysis of that data, how can our customers best preserve the integrity of that data?

How to capture, manage and preserve the integrity of security video data

Fundamentally, customers need high performance, reliable storage that is optimized to handle very large surveillance video workloads 24×7, which may also include metadata tagging to enable AI analytics and deep learning. With this in mind, video surveillance customers require more than a standard PC hard drive. A surveillance-optimized drive is necessary to support the around the clock workload rate and ensure there are no dropped frames. In a world where data is king, every frame counts in order to make a difference and add value to customers.

With the ability to store over 9000 hours of HD video and up to 64 HD cameras, the SkyHawk 14TB is optimized for DVRs and NVRs, tuned for 24/7 workloads, and equipped with ImagePerfect firmware to minimize dropped frames and downtime. Supported by a 3-year limited warranty, customers can also benefit from unique SkyHawk Health Management technology that actively monitors and analyzes drive health, empowering users to prevent, intervene and recover from potential anomalies.

Security and video surveillance systems should be some of the toughest technology we have. There’s no excuse for a bad camera feed, a lost internet connection, a missing moment in time. These systems are built to protect or preserve the most valuable of assets — whether monitoring and securing the world’s largest airports, working to keep us safer at public events, or helping study the behaviors of animals in the wild.

But surveillance video capture technology today serves so many useful purposes beyond traditional security. It enables businesses and other organizations to gather insights about how their business processes are working, improve customer experiences and expand operational efficiency.

Video and sensor analytics or computer vision applications are exploding and already creating massive amounts of data. The challenge with these applications is being able to handle much greater quantities of data, and also disparate types of data streams — video created by cameras and other sources, and metadata produced by integrated neural networks. Seagate, with higher capacities, better performance, and specialized Skyhawk AI drives, sees the need for a different, enhanced set of storage mediums optimized for today’s and tomorrow’s complex and highly specialized video applications.

Developers are working to deploy AI technology that can enable a retailer to analyze captured video to improve how they lay out a store, or may in real-time detect crime like a theft in progress, or someone having a heart attack.

Beyond security purposes: improve shopping experiences, retail layouts, response times

SkyHawk is purpose-built for security and surveillance video applications“Advances in camera resolutions along with AI technology enable, for instance, retailers to better understand customer behaviors and improve shopping experiences in order to reduce the length and time spent waiting in checkout lines, improve retail layouts, and enhance product placement to serve customers’ expectations,” describes Jessica Burton, Seagate SkyHawk product marketing manager. “That can improve customers’ ability to find products they want, and increase their loyalty to the retailer, all of which helps the retailer boost revenue.”

“Cities, on the other hand, can recognize better traffic patterns in order to divert traffic routes away from accidents and bottlenecks as well as enhance efficiency to improve roads, save energy resources, and reduce environmental pollution,” Burton adds. “The financial industry can more easily spot suspicious and unusual activity while also ensuring compliance and mitigating risk. While in healthcare, doctors can more quickly and cost-effectively diagnose patient ailments with Deep Learning video technology.”

SkyHawk surveillance-optimized drives soar with the industry’s latest technology to deliver the most reliable and robust surveillance-optimized drives the market has seen.

Leading security and surveillance system developers choose SkyHawk

Leading security and surveillance system developers know it’s critical to have the right drive deployed in the physical video system that does the recording. A purpose-built drive must be designed to ensure a much higher degree of data integrity without video drop outs or lost data packets, when video footage is being used for evidence or when its deep analysis requires accurate, complete, high-resolution images.

“SkyHawk surveillance drives operate with an extreme workload rating, low power consumption, provide long-term drive reliability and can operate in harsh environments, withstanding a variety of temperature ranges — ideal for British Airways i360 being on the seafront,” says Christopher Dean, owner of Brighton CCTV, who deployed the security systems for British Airways’ i360 tower, an innovative landmark on the Brighton coast.

“After switching to Seagate, we have lower disk failure rates, and we also achieved a remarkable NFD (no frame drop) during our solution partner certification with Milestone System’s Xprotect VMS,” says Bing Wan, Director of Middle East Operations Rasilient Systems.

“All NVRs built by Sentry Security Systems Inc. now feature Seagate SkyHawk surveillance drives,” says Nick Keller
manager of Technical Services at Sentry Security Systems, “because of their proven reliability, increasing performance and recording throughput on our servers.”

And, as video security systems evolve shift from primarily write-only applications to enable ongoing data monitoring, deep learning and analysis, Seagate’s SkyHawk AI enables systems to read and write data to the drive at very high speeds to keep up with deep learning applications. AI applications range from tracking foot traffic to improve retail experiences, understanding what customers are looking for and how they want to shop, to saving lives in healthcare.

“SkyHawk AI supports not only video surveillance workloads, it also supports AI streams that have knowledge — metadata — tied to every frame, for deep learning applications,” explains Burton. “This AI knowledge allows information to be found with more efficient precision to make quicker and smarter decisions. SkyHawk AI works very well with really randomized workloads. So you can manage streams of video coming in, while you’re simultaneously doing analytics or AI on those video streams.”

“Seagate drives enable us to write a very high speed, and also read back the data at a very high speed,” explains Gary Harmer, Sales Director for the UK and Ireland at Seagate partner Hikvision. “The technology’s moved on from being write-only to the drive, and only read back the data on a periodic basis, to a point where we’re simultaneously reading the data to be able to do the deep learning analysis of the content. The move to a drive that can cope with very fast read and write speed times is critical to us.”

With Hikvision’s Deep Learning technology and SkyHawk AI hard drives, Harmer says, customers can glean entirely new levels of valuable, actionable data from these systems.

For security, surveillance and intelligent video systems, you want SkyHawk — because high-resolution and AI video recording demand the most vigilant data solutions.

2019-11-27T14:31:32+00:00

About the Author:

Jessica Burton
Jessica Burton is a global product marketing manager at Seagate.