Expansion of WD Purple Pro HDD and microSD

Western Digital Corp. expanded its Purple family with the WD Purple Pro product line for a new gen of AI-enabled recorders and back-end servers.

The worldwide video surveillance camera market is estimated to grow to $44 billion by 2025, up from $23.6 billion in 2019, according to IDC. Emerging smart video architectures that capture, store and analyze massive amounts of video data, and perform heavy deep-learning video analytics, are putting an unprecedented level of stress on storage subsystems. The WD Purple Pro line is designed to handle these workloads with optimized storage performance, capacity, workload capability and reliability for devices including AI-enabled network video recorders (NVRs), video analytics servers, storage arrays and storage/server solutions, including those that perform deep-learning analytics.

“With the addition of WD Purple Pro, our full portfolio of smart video products covers customers’ needs from dedicated WD Purple microSD cards for cameras to WD Purple HDDs for mainstream NVRs and the new gen of smart video architectures, where the ‘smart’ of the solution starts with the brains at the back-end – the servers that perform video analytics and heavy computational deep learning,” said Brian Mallari, director,marketing, smart video. “WD Purple Pro is the ideal solution to enable OEMs and integrators to evolve their systems for emerging AI workloads.“

Purple Pro HDD benefits include:

• Enhanced AllFrame AI technology enabling video streams from up to 64 HD cameras to be recorded concurrently ⁽¹⁾, while simultaneously handling up to an additional 32 AI streams for AI functions, whether cameras are directly connected to advanced recorders or to cloud-based servers.

• Performance and workload capability, supporting up to 550TB a year workload rating ⁽²⁾, provides for the additional demands of AI functionality, including pattern matching and object/event recognition, while writing a multitude of video streams.

• Reliability and capacity solutions help retain and feed thousands of hours of training video to enable effective deep-learning and AI algorithm development. Capacities range from 8 to 18TB ⁽³⁾ with a 5-year limited warranty.

• enterprise durability to work in large-scale, high-density video analytics servers and cloud solutions. Offers ongoing HDD health monitoring in compatible systems with Western Digital Device Analytics support.

“Western Digital’s new WD Purple Pro, AI-ready high-capacity solutions offer the performance needed for data-heavy workloads and provide the reliability our customers need to store their critical data,” said Dave Nieweg, community program manager, Milestone Systems A/S. “Whether providing more secure access to a building or school, monitoring patients, or capturing and analyzing smart city parking and transportation data for safety and efficiency, offering users a trusted storage solution from the cameras at the endpoints to the cloud is essential.“

The company‘s full family of WD Purple solutions for smart video surveillance includes 1TB Purple microSD cards for cameras and edge devices to 1-8TB Purple HDDs for NVRs; and now, Purple Pro drives from 8 to 18TB to support a range of systems for AI-heavy workloads, including back-end enterprise servers.

Purple Pro solutions will be available this quarter from the company’s resellers.

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Resources:
Blog: Speeding Up: How AI and Data Are Accelerating Our Cities
Storage for advanced smart video solutions product brief

⁽¹⁾ Single stream per camera @ 3.2Mb/s (1080p, H.265, 25 fps). Results may vary depending on camera resolution, file format, frames per second, software, system settings, video quality, and other factors.
⁽²⁾ Workload Rate is defined as the amount of user data transferred to or from the HDD. Workload Rate is annualized (TB transferred five (8760/recorded power-on hours)). Workload Rate will vary depending on your hardware and software components and configurations.
⁽³⁾ As used for storage capacity, 1GB=one billion bytes and 1TB=one trillion bytes. Actual user capacity may be less due to operating environment.