Cloud storage and its application prospect in the field of security monitoring

With the advent of the HD era, the ancient storage mode has been unable to meet the needs of high-definition, more and more enterprise customers video communications demand for explosive growth, coupled with the strong promotion of equipment manufacturers, video surveillance will be used in the field of cloud storage this topic became hot. The new generation of information technology, represented by cloud computing, Internet of Things and mobile interconnection, has become a strategic emerging industry and will be supported and developed by the State in the 35 period.

Objective

In the 2010 China International Public Security Products Expo, facing the growing demand for security storage, as the leading storage manufacturers, UIT (Innovation Division Storage Technology Co., Ltd.) comprehensive participation, "network video surveillance storage experts" as the theme, all-round display of centralized storage, distributed storage, Cloud storage and HD intelligent analysis of the four areas of a variety of video surveillance storage products and solutions to help more security users easily into the security world.

Video surveillance technology is also towards high-definition, digital, networked, intelligent direction. and the enhancement of the picture quality, the increase of the video line and so on many factors, will make the video surveillance system's storage capacity multiplied, the storage equipment is becoming the network video surveillance future development decisive factor. In this exhibition, in view of the customer's application characteristics, uit demonstrated the large capacity video surveillance storage solution built on its unified storage system and the application storage system, as well as the innovative elastic cloud storage solution and the HD Intelligent analysis Technology, has led the security industry storage application new trend comprehensively.

The extensive application of information technology to promote the upgrading and optimization of traditional industries is also the focus of economic restructuring, but including health care reform, social security, education reform and other sound public services in the process, information technology and the application of informatization will also play an important role. Therefore, in the process of optimizing economic structure and perfecting public service, it will play a key role in the application of information industry and informatization. In this process, our security industry and information applications will also face unprecedented opportunities and challenges.

Characteristics and requirements of video surveillance image storage

Video image storage has a huge footprint

One of the characteristics of video surveillance system is that the image information is huge, the storage capacity required is quite considerable, and it requires enough storage space. As one of the main back-end devices of the video surveillance system, the system storage device should be able to store and manage the data collected and compressed by the front end through the network, and meet the demand of the video monitoring and storage.

Because the stored image is the core resource of the whole city video network monitoring system, it is very important to choose the storage mechanism and device, which needs to be determined according to the specific requirements and application conditions.

Networked storage devices combine disks, RAID, SCSI, file system, Gigabit Ethernet, storage management, storage virtualization, ISCSI, network communications and many other key technologies, with data protection, disk hot plug, fan and power redundancy and other reliability requirements, so will become the focus of choice.

As an image data and alarm event recording carrier, the importance of storage is self-evident, at present, storage is not only a device, but has been sublimated to a solution platform. Large-capacity storage systems are not a simple accumulation of storage devices, but also need to address the adequacy of storage mechanisms, storage standards, and the availability of time (storage data processing speed) and space (storage capacity), as well as the manageability requirements of large capacity storage systems.

DVR video occupies storage capacity and image quality, storage camera image, video recorder image compression ratio (which is related to the format of compression and image changes). At present, most of the domestic DVR is simplified H.264 or MPEG4, image quality is CIF level, HDD consumption rate is about 100m/road? Hours, the 16-way DVR 1TB hard drive can be recorded for 26 consecutive days. Based on the most basic million-pixel camera collection 720P as the standard, the normal hourly video required about the hard disk capacity of 4g~8g/hours, for economic reasons, reduce video recording per hour can be compressed to about 3GB capacity. Take this as an example, according to one months to save time calculation, 8 channel monitoring about 17T (17000G) capacity around. In the same image quality, H.264 data compression ratio than the current DVD system used in MPEG-2 high 2~3 times, than MPEG-4 high 1.5~2 times.

Security monitoring technology has gone through three stages today: analog, digital, networked. In contrast, monitoring data storage has undergone several stages: VCR analog data storage, DVR digital data storage, current centralized networked storage, and recently emerging cloud storage technologies.

With the development of the network of video surveillance, the amount of video data that needs to be stored and managed is becoming more and more abundant, and the technology of networked storage (NSA, SAN), cloud storage and virtual Information Center has great application prospect in the development of security monitoring industry.

Three major patterns of video surveillance storage and requirements of six aspects

Monitoring storage Three-pattern

First, front-end storage pattern

The so-called front-end storage, is in the network video surveillance system front-end equipment (such as network video encoder or Network camera) in the built-in storage parts, the front-end equipment directly complete the monitoring image of local recording and preservation.

Front-end Storage has several advantages: one is that it is possible to reduce the capacity pressure of centralized storage through distributed storage deployment, and the other is to effectively mitigate the network traffic pressure caused by centralized storage; The third is to avoid the loss of images in centralized storage in the event of a network failure. For front-end storage, because a single front-end coding device usually with a few points of control point, storage time is not long, so the storage capacity requirements are not high, network cameras generally use CF card or SD card, video server generally with built-in hard disk. This is the same as the previous stand-alone storage, basically no difference.

However, in order to ensure the flexibility and convenience of the user access, all front-end storage in the network video surveillance system can provide the point-to-point single machine access, but also the centralized sharing of all content through a unified interface. Therefore, the Network video surveillance system manages and dispatches all front-end storage through the center business platform, and realizes the network of storage space and storage content. In this way, users can directly login to a single front-end equipment for video playback on-demand, but also can be unified Login Center business Platform for all front-end video data centralized retrieval and playback.

Second, the central storage pattern

In the network video surveillance system, the deployment is more central storage. The front-end equipment collects the monitoring point image and encodes it into a digital monitoring code stream, then transmits it to the central business platform through the network, and distributes the code stream to the network video unit for centralized storage by the central business Platform. In many large-scale video surveillance network application, also may use the multi-level distribution central storage way, namely the Branch center storage, such on one hand can reduce a central point storage to bring the storage capacity and the network flow pressure, can greatly enhance the system reliability. Use Center/Sub-center storage, there are obvious advantages in the following aspects: first, for users, the retrieval and call video resources more convenient; second, the integrity of the storage content is easier to ensure that a front-end device will not be stolen or damaged caused by the loss of important content; Allocate storage space on demand for front-end equipment, thus saving resources; Four is advantageous to develop the diversification storage strategy, satisfies the user the personalized demand, five is maintains conveniently, facilitates the centralized detection and the timely investigation question.

For the small number of monitoring points, storage time requirements are not long applications, central/sub-center storage can be a server-disk or external disk cabinets this relatively simple way to deploy, known as Das (direct access to storage), similar to a single machine. And with the advantages of network video surveillance is widely recognized, now began to appear more and more large or even super large video surveillance system, such as "Ping An city" in the construction of social Security monitoring system, China Telecom and Netcom are fully advancing the "global Eye" and "wide vision" of the two operating-level video surveillance system, These monitoring systems are confronted with the demand of large-scale access and high-capacity centralized storage of front-end devices. In the past, stand-alone storage has been unable to meet the requirements of these systems in terms of flexible capacity expansion, and must adopt more advanced networked storage devices and storage technologies, typically SAN, Nas, and iSCSI.

SAN (storage Area Network) originated in the late 90, unlike Das, sans are based on Fibre Channel technology, and servers and storage arrays are connected through Fibre Channel switches to form a regional network dedicated to data storage. SAN uses network-oriented storage structure, data processing and data storage separation, with storage space easy to expand, addressing flexible, long-distance transmission data, I/O performance high, storage equipment utilization high characteristics, is a new storage architecture.

Unlike Sans, which are based on dedicated Fibre Channel protocols, NAS (Network access storage) implements the interconnection of servers and storage arrays based on IP networks, communicates using TCP/IP protocols, and transmits data in file-level I/O. In contrast, NAS devices are simpler to install, debug, use, and manage, and their deployment costs are relatively low.

iSCSI is a new standard protocol for the IETF, a transport standard that converts SCSI block data into a network packet through an IP network, which, like Nas, transmits data through an IP network, but in data access mode, it is different from Nas, The same blockprotocol protocol as the SAN. As a result, the value of iSCSI to users is: First, iSCSI makes it possible for SCSI packets to be transported over Ethernet, to get sans from expensive fiber-optic networks, and to achieve the original functionality via IP networks, both reducing management complexity and reducing costs; second, because of the complexity of user application requirements, It is often possible to deploy both SAN and NAS two storage networks, while iSCSI can combine them. These features of iSCSI are very consistent with the current situation and direction of video surveillance development, especially in the field of operation-level video surveillance, storage scale, high investment, based on the current mature IP network for central/sub-center storage System Construction, iSCSI technology is undoubtedly a good reference.

III. Application Storage Pattern

Video surveillance systems often use a storage network architecture with Das, NAS, SAN, and Ip-san, with SCSI disk arrays, FC, and iSCSI devices commonly used for storage device types. These devices are mature, simple in structure and convenient for installation and implementation. However, these devices have a common disadvantage, that is, the storage device in the video surveillance system can only play a simple data storage function, can not replace the server to run a specific application software, video surveillance system still needs a large number of dedicated servers. In fact, with the rapid development of chip technology, CPU or ASIC chip operation and processing speed doubled, while the overall cost of storage equipment is declining. In equipment selection and purchase, for equipment replacement considerations, users will generally choose a slightly higher level of storage equipment. Moreover, when the investment is abundant, the price difference affects the user less. Therefore, in many application systems, the user procurement of storage equipment performance is often higher than the actual business system needs a lot, or even more than several times.

In some small and medium video surveillance system, the performance bottleneck in the system often appears in the video server rather than the storage device side, the storage device can provide the bandwidth is often video monitoring the actual total bandwidth of twice times or three times times, IOPS is the actual demand 3~5 times. The storage device controller is in a half load working state for a long time and a lot of high performance resources are wasted. In order to ensure high availability, efficiency, stability and security, the controller parts of the storage device are generally specially designed, and use a dedicated processor and cache, its technical parameters and performance are higher than the ordinary PC server. In order to effectively use the storage resources, the storage device controller can be embedded in the special function of the application software, storage devices not only for the system to provide data storage server, but also to provide a certain software application server, this storage device is called application storage.