Quantum’s StorNext 6 scale-out storage system on display at IFSEC 2017

Quantum’s award-winning StorNext® has become the platform of choice for storing and managing video, having been developed specifically for intelligence, military reconnaissance, security and surveillance applications.

StorNext 6 advanced data management

As part of its continued commitment to enabling improved video surveillance through a better storage platform, Quantum will showcase StorNext 6, the major new StorNext® release. Launched in April 2017, StorNext 6 adds new advanced data management features to the industry-leading streaming performance of the company’s scale-out tiered storage solutions portfolio, which includes flash, disk, tape and public and private cloud storage offerings. With this unique combination of performance and management, Quantum continues to extend the power of StorNext in highly video-intensive environments such as surveillance and government security.

The new release of the StorNext® storage system addresses the needs of enterprises grappling with using their existing appliance-based solutions to store large, rapidly growing data sets, such as increasingly large video formats captured from ever-expanding video surveillance camera-counts. It also helps them to meet another growing trend within the industry – drive business value from that data. These enterprises are quickly realising that traditional video storage appliances are too difficult to upgrade, cannot deliver sufficient performance and are unable to handle parallel workloads.

Traditional IT-based solutions are not optimised for video or write-intensive performance. StorNext 6 not only overcomes these limitations but also provides more efficient and cost-effective ways to share and access files across geographically distributed teams, to manage and protect archived data, and to audit changes to data throughout its lifecycle. Quantum delivers all these benefits in an integrated, multi-tier storage solution that maintains optimised performance levels, visibility and access at every tier. 

Importance of robust storage systems

At the show, Quantum will demonstrate why a robust storage system is essential for anyone in video surveillance who needs to capture, store, share, and retrieve video content with high bit rates and frame sizes. It will also highlight precisely how video surveillance implementations are benefitting from the performance and value that Quantum provides. It’s vital that organisations that operate video surveillance infrastructures understand that video is a unique data type, and incoming video should be managed in a specific way that optimises the dataset for video applications - making the entire process faster and more efficient.

Since exhibiting at last year’s IFSEC International, Quantum has received several industry accolades for its multi-tiered, intelligent storage infrastructure. These include: 

• American Security Today’s ASTORS Homeland Security Award for Best Video Data Storage Solution, 2016
• 2016 Technology Partner of the Year, Axis Connect and Converge Conference
• 2016 Technology Partner of the Year Americas, Milestone Integration Platform Symposium (MIPS)
• Milestone APAC Solution Partner of the Year, 2015 and 2016
• Security Industry Association (SIA) New Product Showcase at ISC West StorNext 5.4, Video Surveillance Data Storage
• GOVIES, 2017 Platinum Award for Video Surveillance Data Storage – for StorNext 5.4

StorNext 6 new features

There are a number of important new features within StorNext 6 that are of particular interest to the video surveillance community. It includes new enhancements that are designed to fit within existing ecosystem applications and tools, and are engineered to handle more complex streaming workloads.

FlexSync Continuous Content Synchronisation can create a replica of a source file system, directory or individual file onto another local or remote file system. It can then create copies of surveillance data to provide an off-site copy of video content for data protection or distribution, and maintains continuous and efficient synchronisation through metadata monitoring. This has the added benefit of protecting data from malicious acts, as this feature also can have multiple “versions” if files are modified. FlexSync can be configured to run as frequently as every minute, providing a very short window before the file is replicated.

FlexSpace Multi-Site Shared Archive enables distributed, collaborative workflows, creating “stubs” to remotely archived files and using S3-based object store repositories. For environments where many geographically distributed users need access to the same content, FlexSpace provides those users access to a cloud copy without replicating the data to each location. Only necessary content is downloaded to the local system. This is advantageous in situations when there is limited network bandwidth between sites that must maintain access to all of the content.

Client-based “Quality of Service” (QoS) enables bandwidth throttling, to specify the maximum bandwidth permitted for a client. In addition, bandwidth reservation guarantees throughput for one client while limiting bandwidth for others. Within a security environment, there are multiple scenarios where this is a benefit. For example, ingest of real-time video from the cameras has different performance requirements than playback of previously recorded data. Client-based QoS can set up different systems to provide the appropriate level of performance for their function, ensuring that the most critical ingest always has priority over other functions.

Online Stripe Group Management provides non-disruptive storage scaling with auto redistribution. As surveillance system requirements evolve, this capability enables a storage infrastructure to change as well—without disrupting ingest and other functions.  Additional capacity and bandwidth can be added to an active file system to meet increased retention or performance requirements.

File System Auditing provides an activity trail of “what, when, and who” made changes to file metadata and the contents of the file itself. In a security environment, the ability to determine all the “touch-points” for a file can be very important, for investigative purposes as well as to preserve chain of custody for video content. StorNext now provides a higher level of insight into the activity within a file system.

Additional enhancements such as tier copy management allows administrators to effectively and flexibly manage the storage tier in which data resides much more effectively, and also choose the storage platform – including cloud — from which data will be retrieved. Previously, all tiers were treated the same from a retention standpoint, and retrieval always came from the first copy regardless of the storage platform. Now, administrators can specify how long data resides on a particular storage tier. For example, they may want to keep data on primary storage for 30 days, tape for one year, and in the cloud for three years - and which tier they want to retrieve the file from first based on cost or performance considerations.

Collaboration on a global scale

With these new features, StorNext 6 enables collaboration on a global scale while delivering the performance and management needed for surveillance storage environments as they grow.

Wayne Arvidson, Vice President, Intelligence, Surveillance and Security Solutions at Quantum said: “Video surveillance is among the most challenging workloads for any storage environment, so a robust storage system is critical to protect people and property from harm. A scalable and intelligent storage platform such as Quantum’s, which is designed specifically for the demands of video, can also be used to extract business value from video-based data, producing business benefits and financial returns.

StorNext 6 offers new features to enable collaboration on a global scale while delivering the performance and management needed for surveillance storage environments as they grow. At IFSEC International we will demonstrate to attendees how these features can drive greater productivity, innovation and insight.”