Wavestore recently introduced EcoStore, an energy saving technology that offers the potential to save over 80% of the overall energy normally required for a hard drive storage solution to deliver sustainability. It does so by facilitating the spin-down of hard drives, or groups of hard drives, which are not in a read/write state.
While EcoStore is writing camera data to the first drive or group, the other drives or groups are spun down. As that drive or group becomes full, the next are spun up and take over the recording whilst the first spins down again.As well as hard drive energy, associated cost savings are also achievable, such as reductions in air conditioning requirements and by limiting the wear and tear on disks that are always being powered on and spinning.
“Video surveillance systems with a high number of cameras invariably require large video data storage servers which can be costly to run,” said Julian Inman, Head of Product Management for Wavestore. “We believe EcoStore, which is unique to Wavestore, can lay claim to be the most energy efficient, long-term storage solution available on the professional security market.
“The good news is that EcoStore does not require any special hardware, it is compatible across our standard E, PT, V, X-Series and PetaBlok ranges. System integrators will also be pleased to learn that they will not require any specialist knowledge or skill sets to implement EcoStore, as it is quick and easy to set-up.”
Energy savings start with just a small numbers of drives, but the more drives within a server, the larger the energy saving can be. At the top end of the scale, a PetaBlok based storage solution at its maximum capacity of 204 drives (2.04PB) per server, and configured as 17 RAID groups each consisting of 12 drives, requires just 288 watts to spin the active drives – an energy saving of over 82%. These savings have greater significance when you take into account that up to 255 servers can be joined together in a group, providing scale for even the largest applications.”
EcoStore also supports Wavestore’s proprietary HyperRAID technology, which is designed to protect data stored across multiple drives in an array, at up to N+5 redundancy. This allows multiple HyperRAID arrays within the same unit to be spun-down when not in a read/write state.
“Wavestore has the fastest video recall of any VMS on the market and that’s something we wanted to retain with EcoStore” said Inman, “Thanks to Wavestore’s proprietary file system, operators can quickly retrieve video that is stored on a spun-down drive, as the index of the location of that video is always available on a spun-up drive. This provides a seamless operator experience when reviewing footage via the WaveView and WaveView Mobile client software, even on the largest systems with many Petabytes of stored data”.
