Draft27-12

IS NOW
Combining thermal security cameras with video management systems.
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Untitled-20 1 18/02/16 10:18
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Andrew Palmer of
Seagate speaking
to installers at the
Hikvision roadshow at
Bristol in October
Photo by Mark Rowe
Seagate’s new
Skyhawk AI ten
terabyte hard drive
for surveillance
system use
Photo courtesy of
Seagate
UNHAPPY
‘An average CT
investigation recovers
approx four terabytes.’
Alison Saunders,
Director of Public
Prosecutions on digital
material in counter
terror cases.
don’t overlook the hard drive:
Welcome to the datasphere,
one of the speakers at the
ST17 London conference
told the audience. He was Andrew
Palmer of Seagate, the storage hard
drive company. As he admitted from
the start, the hard drive (whether for
surveillance systems in particular or
an everyday computer) is something
that people may only think about
when the time comes to change it,
or if it should break down. Seagate
has patented that word ‘datasphere’
to put across how important the
sheer amount of data is, and will
be. Andrew reported an estimate
of 163 zetabytes of data around by
the year 2025. What’s a zeta? A
number with 21 zeroes in front of it,
a sign of how even the language is
having its boundaries pushed. Or put
another way, 163 billion terabytes.
As a comparison, the industry has so
far shipped about five zetabytes of
drives. Put them face to face, Andrew
reckons, and they could go around the
world and then some.
Drivers
What’s driving that? Various things;
‘smart’ cities; the Internet of Things,
and the relatively trivial systems of
our daily lives, such as parking, street
lights, power management and fire
detection, besides the more security
ones such as perimeter access.
What’s creating all the data is not
so much people on the internet, but
the billions of sensors; that’s where
Seagate sees its business. And the
location of data is shifting, Andrew
DECEMBER 2017 PROFESSIONAL SECURITY
Welcome to the
datasphere
went on; it’s already shifted from
the first mainframe computers, to
PCs; to mobile devices and cloud
storage; and its still growing. A fourth
platform is developing, ‘edge of the
cloud’, for example for driverless
cars. As Andrew said, a driverless
car should know at once if it should
not run over a person in the way; and
its action will be to drive around, or
stop. That will require almost constant
interaction with computers. Storage
companies will have to manage these
new workloads; hence new drives on
the market, such as Seagate’s new
Skyhawk AI. Hard drives are not
only archiving data, such as from a
surveillance camera, but are reading
and writing that data. The company
also sees a trend of cameras becoming
more mobile (as in use in those
driverless cars, for example) and
hence new products to serve transport
applications. And new services, such
as for data recovery of data after flood
or fire. Speaking to the installers at
ST17, Andrew suggested that health
management could be a service that
they could charge for, as part of a
maintenance contract. Rather than a
user ringing the installer to say (or
complain) that a hard drive has broken
down; the installer would know when
to ring that customer to say that the
hard drive is about to break down.
About GDPR
Andrew went on to the EU-wide
general data protection regulation
(GDPR) due to come into force in
May; it’s not just about you having a
robust system of data protection, but
of your suppliers, he suggested, given
cases where hackers go through a thirdparty
system (the air conditioning for
instance) to then go after more valuable
personal data (such as credit cards).
Smaller
He went through the hard drive as a
product, from the early days when it
(they were so big and rare you could
only rent one) had to be transported
by aeroplane, to the vastly smaller and
more efficient devices now. The platter
is where the data gets stored; while it
might remind you of music compact
discs being played, it’s actually not flat,
but has very tiny concentric grooves,
far finer than the edge of a piece of
paper. The data - the binary zeroes and
ones - in physical form is tiny, like a
‘grain of rice’; the entire contents of
the Web, as Andrew said, weight the
same as an orange. Silicon at the end
of the read-write arm magnetises the
‘grain of rice’, to make them a zero or
one.
How to grow
How to grow the capacity of a hard
drive, to cope with the ever-increasing
amount of data? For Seagate and
other manufacturers have reached 10
terabytes, and the 100 will come next.
A manufacturer can either get more
grooves on the platter, more ‘grains of
rice’ in the groove, or more platters in
the box. Andrew gave more numbers
to show what’s going on in the box,
routinely, to store CCTV or other
data; the spin of the platter 7500 times
a minute makes the read-write arm
flutter; your thumbnail will grow more
in eight seconds than how high the arm
is above what it’s reading. Another
way to get more out of everything is to
do away with air, and to insert helium
instead, for a ‘smoother environment’,
and to lose some of the heat created.
And the manufacturer can overlay
grooves. Each ‘grain of rice’ is stood
on end, so that it presents only the end
of its grain to the read-write arm; to
cope with things becoming yet smaller,
a laser is replacing the silicon. “And
people say to me, that’s great,” Andrew
said ruefully, “but can I have £10 off.”
He summed up with that idea of an
installer building in services, as a good
revenue stream. p
www.professionalsecurity.co.uk
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