When AI empowers smart video, how will it change the world? In fact, in the past few years, we are seeing the widespread application and landing of smart video. In the field of health, we use it to detect fever, maintain social distancing, and accurately count the flow of people; in smart cities, smart video helps city managers to allocate safe resources, waste management and ecological environmental protection; in smart factories, it can be used to do automated quality control and system reliability monitoring to effectively solve operating costs. In addition, in the field of transportation, in the field of security, in many fields and scenarios, we have increasingly seen the figure of smart video.
Not long ago, market research agency Security Sales & Integration released a research report showing that smart video is becoming a mainstream application. Of the nearly 200 companies surveyed, 48.1 percent of system integrators surveyed said that at least 25 percent of their deployments in the past six months included smart video solutions. Another 15 percent of respondents said smart video is being used in most of the projects they deploy.
Challenges and opportunities
However, smart video also poses a great challenge to storage. On the one hand, with the development of artificial intelligence, a large amount of artificial intelligence metadata will be generated. This metadata is not just metadata in the video stream, but also metadata related to artificial intelligence. Because the new AI camera will not only generate the main code stream, but also the secondary code stream, the picture stream and the AI metadata stream. Therefore, the role of artificial intelligence in cameras is not limited to storing video. It actually stores all the other metadata and files, enabling the creation of more effective AI solutions that provide deeper insights. As we all know, the more frequent the number of seeks of HDD heads, the worse the performance of the user's actual experience, due to the great randomness of these data, it will greatly increase the HDD disk seek frequency, without the support of innovative technology, the current HDD is difficult to process efficiently.
On the other hand, the write-read model of storage has also changed dramatically. The original original video will not be accessed after being stored and stored, and the write-read model is basically 10:1. The emergence of smart video has completely activated these data, and the stored video can be extracted by a high-performance analysis server for face analysis, model analysis, and structured analysis, and the write-read model has become 1:1 or even 1:N. Under such a write-and-read model, higher requirements are also put forward for storage devices, and storage is no longer just about how to save faster and more, but how to integrate with AI services to achieve optimal integration.
Therefore, smart video puts forward three new requirements for storage systems:
1. Additional performance is required to ensure structured data storage, in addition to the conventional performance guarantee up to 64 channels of 4K ultra-high-definition video stream concurrent writes, it is also necessary to reserve additional bandwidth to ensure the read and write performance of structured data.
2. Lower power consumption to meet the requirements of harsh energy consumption. Today's storage systems must support dual carbon emission reductions and reduce operating costs, as well as reduce heat emissions and reduce the complexity of system thermal design.
3. Support hard disk health management. In order to keep the storage system online at all times, it is necessary to detect its health status in real time, make real-time analysis and reporting, and reduce operating and maintenance costs and improve the customer experience.
Build black technology
In order to support the storage system of smart video, Western Digital, the "veteran" of the storage industry, has specially launched a targeted "purple disk" - WD Purple storage products and solutions, including WD Purple memory cards, WD Purple HDD and WD Purple Pro HDD.
In WD Purple HDD, the way cold, warm, and hot data is stored in partitions and machine learning algorithms are creatively introduced to improve the processing of AI streams. In partitioned storage, video streams and image streams are mainly static traditional data, while metadata streams, system data, etc. are classified as warm data. WD Purple HDD can identify and aggregate warm data through machine learning algorithms, and then store it in a specially configured physical area of the disc, thereby greatly reducing the number of HDD seek operations. This innovation can make HDDs even in very complex load flow situations, can ensure sustainable, stable performance, to meet the requirements of intelligence.
In addition, the HDD also has a built-in DDCM (Data Dynamic Configuration Management) development interface, allowing OEMs to further refine the partition storage processing of hot and cold data according to the actual situation of the NVR write disk load they develop.
WD Purple HDD supports up to 64 inputs, 4K HD concurrent storage, and consumes 25% less power than the previous generation. This is due to Western Digital's innovation in technology, algorithms, and HDD capacity density. Whereas previous HDDs had a capacity of only 1.67TB, today's WD Purple HDDs have a capacity of 2TB, requiring fewer disks at the same capacity, so power consumption can be reduced.
On top of the WD Purple HDD, Western Digital also released a larger capacity WD Purple Pro HDD, the main application scenarios are back-end video storage, video analysis, machine learning, deep learning. WD Purple Pro HDD's high-reliability, high-capacity solution provides thousands of hours of video data for AI storage, as well as enterprise-class durability, providing non-stop work support for large-scale, high-density video analytics servers and cloud solutions. Because the product is compatible with the Western Digital Device Analytic software system, it can monitor the working conditions of the hard disk in real time, ensure that the product is always in a healthy state, ensure stable and efficient writing of data, and prevent data loss.
In the field of AI, WD Purple Pro HDD also provides AllFrame technology, in addition to supporting video streams of up to 64 high-definition cameras, but also being able to synchronize and process an additional 32 artificial intelligence data streams according to the operational needs of AI, ensuring that whether it is a camera, an advanced recorder or a cloud server can be connected at the same time. In addition, WD Purple Pro HDD supports annual workload rates of up to 550TB, supporting the write requirements of large video streams.
In addition to the two brothers WD Purple HDD and WD Purple Pro HDD, Western Digital also released the WD Purple SC QD101 microSD memory card product, which is mainly for terminal cameras. In the field of smart video, it is necessary to record video for a long time, and the reliability is relatively high; and because the camera is installed in a relatively high position, maintenance is also more troublesome. Therefore, Western Digital has built a health management system for this series of memory cards, so that users can know the specific working conditions of the memory cards through mobile phones.
Spotlight on China
For Smart Video, China is the biggest piece of cake. According to the statistics of Omdia, a well-known research institution, the total global revenue of the smart video market in 2021 is about 24.2 billion US dollars, of which the Chinese market alone accounts for 50%, and the compound annual growth rate is expected to be 6.1%-7.1% in the next few years.
Yang Junwen, Managing Director of Greater China Channel Business of Western Digital, said: "The Chinese market has always been valued by Western Digital, and we also deeply understand the storage challenges of the smart video market and the diversified needs of users. We continue to innovate in the field of smart video, actively expand our products, and provide customers with the ideal smart video storage solution with professional WD Purple and WD Purple Pro series storage products. ”
As an important partner of Western Digital in China, Shenzhen Tongwei Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Tongwei Shares") integrates Western Digital's intelligent video storage solution based on the concept of "All-in-One", and has developed a management machine TD-A400MTC-E specifically for security monitoring applications, which integrates management, video streaming replication and distribution, and video browsing, and has good equipment and platform compatibility to meet the comprehensive application of large and medium-sized security systems.
Today, the management machine TD-A400MTC-E launched by the same company has been widely used in large and medium-sized video surveillance systems in retail, park, education, finance, chain, building, medical and other industries. With powerful smart storage, customers can build systems that enable richer and more personalized functionality.
Today, we can see the rich application scenarios of smart storage empowerment in commercial complexes in many cities.
Let's start with the employees in the office area. With smart storage, when employees pass through the camera at the entrance, they can automatically complete the punch card through face recognition, eliminating the trouble of swiping the physical card and preventing cheating such as swiping. Custom attendance schedules are also supported for employees who need to be often out of the home or flexible. For those employees who need to work in a fixed area, such as front desk personnel, financial personnel, etc., the system can also intelligently set the area entry, area departure, and line statistics so that the company can manage the employees more accurately.
Then there's the property management department. In the past, managing this three-story, thousand-seat parking lot has always been a difficult problem. Now with smart storage, the property can physically see the total number of parking spaces, used parking spaces, and the number of remaining parking spaces, which is convenient for controlling traffic flow. For temporary vehicles, it is also possible to customize the charging rules; for those "old lai" vehicles, it can also be identified and processed in a timely manner.
Finally, let's talk about the operator. With the support of smart storage, the operator can classify and analyze people, motor vehicles and non-motor vehicles, can conduct real-time statistics on the in and outgoing passenger flow, and can also compare and analyze the passenger flow in different periods, and output daily/weekly/annual report statistics, so as to better do a good job in investment planning and merchant adjustment, and promote the virtuous cycle of commercial complexes.
It can be seen that smart video has a broad application scenario and market in China. In the future, Western Digital will continue to explore channels extensively, cooperate with industry partners for in-depth cooperation, and integrate multi-party professional experience, actively layout and optimize the product portfolio for China's local market, meet users' more needs for smart video data storage, and grow together with China.