IS NOW Combining thermal security cameras with video management systems. www.flir.com Untitled-20 1 18/02/16 10:18 64 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 p64 Networks 27-<strong>12</strong>.indd 1 18/11/2017 <strong>12</strong>:<strong>12</strong>
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