Three reasons why your video footage should be stored on Ceph Open Source Software Defined Storage

In recent years the use of video surveillance has seen staggering growth. Everyone is familiar with the original use cases – the local government organisations that have fitted cameras in the town centre to monitor drunken revellers in late night hot spots, and the filming of retail outlets and other premises to catch thieves red handed and provide evidence that leads to conviction. Today, as the technology has become cheaper and image clarity has improved, the use cases are expanding dramatically: it’s not at all unusual now to see video recording equipment fitted to vehicle dashboards to provide evidence in insurance cases, and it’s become common for cameras to be fitted to or carried by employees for a wide variety of purposes, from police officers and soldiers’ helmets to engineers taking footage of repair works in the field, to universities storing the lectures of teaching staff for absent pupils and remote learners: enterprises are capturing and storing more video than ever before.

This ever-expanding use of video isn’t free. The cost of capturing the footage in the first place might be coming down, but the volume of data stored is constantly expanding and new use cases are constantly being found for the data itself as what began as legal evidence becomes useful data for analytics: that town centre video morphs from crime prevention and detection into analytics for traffic movement, the engineer’s video becomes part of a staff training repository, the soldier’s helmet cam becomes the tactical wash up, and the retail footage becomes part of mapping customer behaviour in store.

Unsurprisingly enterprises across the public and private sectors are challenged to keep as much of the footage as they possibly can for as long a time as possible. Future requirements and the unending use-case expansion make a ‘cold’ store approach in the likes of Amazon Glacier unappealing: you never know when you are going to need that footage, but you do know that when you do require it the data footprint will be epic, and you will not want to get a surprise kick in the budget for moving what can be petabytes at a time – no matter how cheap your service is at rest.

This makes the business case for using Ceph from SUSE very strong – here’s three for the money:

1. It’s open source with unlimited scalability
2. Uses commodity hardware for reduced costs
3. No charges from cloud providers for moving the data you need

Can you afford not to?

Look out for our upcoming case study of Orchard Park Police Department and their use of SUSE Enterprise Storage to host body camera data.