Veracity Partners With WD

Veracity UK Ltd., in connectivity and transmission solutions for IP Video, announced a partnership with Western Digital Corp. The partnership follows the realisation by the two companies that Veracity’s COLDSTORE video surveillance storage array is aligned with Western Digital’s new AV disk drive range which is designed for audio-visual storage.

Western Digital’s AV HDD range delivers high reliability, noise and energy reduction and is optimised for 24×7 digital video recording and rapid access in playback mode. Veracity’s COLDSTORE uses patented LAID (Linear Array of Idle Disks) technology and SFSTM (Sequential Filing System), in order to offer reliability, quick file access and low running costs. At the core of COLDSTORE’s design is the recognition that generating and retrieving video data is done in a fundamentally different way from general IT data.

Research by Veracity proved that video data disk traffic typically consists of 97% recording and just 3% playback, compared to general IT data which is typified by ‘read-modify-write’ disk activity – short, high volume bursts of data transfer. As a result video recording places higher demands on disk drives, generating heat, vibration and wear which shortens disk lifespan and increases the risk of disk failure in video management systems. Many users have invested in complex, expensive RAID5/6 storage systems with heavy duty, power-hungry processing platforms to attempt to reduce the risk of disk failure but these systems are not delivering the reliability and return on investment that users are demanding.

Western Digital spotted the same issue and devoted extensive resources in the Western Digital Research Labs to solving it. This research led to the development of a new generation of HDDs built specifically for audio and video storage. Designed for 24×7 operations which are common in video surveillance systems, they deliver 60% higher reliability than competitor offerings and are optimised for smooth streaming of high resolution video and on-demand read/write operations. They generate significantly less heat and consume less power in operation than competitor HDDs.

Scott Sereboff, CEO of Veracity USA, said: “It is great to be presenting jointly with Western Digital at the ISC One2One Summit next week. The joint presentation we have prepared for this conference will display of how both organisations’ new technologies have been made more compelling through this collaboration.”

Alastair McLeod, managing director, Veracity UK Limited, commented further: “COLDSTORE and Western Digital’s new range of AV disk drives are perfectly aligned to provide low power, high reliability storage for the IP Surveillance world. We both offer a solution to the reliability problems posed by RAID technology, commonly deployed external storage arrays for enterprise video surveillance, which makes disk failure the single largest vulnerability in video management and recording systems today.”

COLDSTORE is a 19-inch rack mount disk array with space to accommodate 15 HDDs to provide a current maximum capacity of 30 TB, rising to 45 TB in the future. COLDSTORE records sequentially on the drives, similar to a video tape, minimising disk read/write arm movement minimised. Veracity’s own ingenious method of writing to disks means that no data is lost if a disk fails and no rebuilds are required.

Each disk is written to sequentially, with inactive disks switched off, resulting in disks being switched off for 87% of the time, which, in combination with the Veracity-designed controller hardware, cuts power consumption of the entire array to around 56 Watts, or 10% of comparable RAID systems. Disks containing relevant periods of recording can be easily identified and, if mass seizure of evidence is required, extracted and handed over to the authorities as evidence. Extracted disks can be connected to any Windows PC via a standard USB connection and even mega-pixel video data can be replayed directly.