Western Digital Corporation is a data technology company which provides a variety of data solutions, purpose-built for today’s surveillance needs
On the final day of the show, PSI caught up with Brian Mallari, Director of Product Marketing for surveillance and enterprise products at WD to find out how the event had gone.
What has been popular on the stand this year?
It has actually been two products! Firstly is the WD Purple microSD card for cameras with on-board storage. The use case for this card is consistent storage for when you don’t have an NVR – or if you do have an NVR but experience the network fail, when your stream would not be recorded but the card will provide storage until the network is back up and running.
The second product that has been popular is the 12TB WD Purple hard drive which we launched at the show. This is the highest capacity hard drive in the industry, special because we have bumped up the capability from 180TB per year to 360TB and our MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) went from a million to 1.5 million hours. This supports 64 cameras per drive plus an additional 16 AI streams. It is intended for systems such as the Hikvision Deep in Mind system that features deep learning. You are now not just streaming video to the box but doing facial recognition searches and people counting.
Cameras don’t just capture video these days, so how are you keeping on top of innovation?
When you think about the surveillance of twenty years ago the majority of video was not even watched. Today it is not only looked at but kept to satisfy the need for data for deep learning. You need hours of footage to be able to program cameras to recognise specific behaviour. It is wonderful because surveillance was always looking in the rear view mirror but now we can look forward with analysis to generate value from that data.
Because of this higher retention we are seeing the need for storage going up and raising the capacity requirements of hard drives.
