DataDirect Networks (DDN) - Experts & Thought Leaders

DataDirect Networks (DDN) announced its acquisition of Intel’s Lustre File System business and related assets for undisclosed terms. This important acquisition reinforces DDN's presence as the global market leader for data at scale, while providing Lustre customers with enhanced field support and a well-funded technology roadmap. The acquisition also enables DDN to expand Lustre’s leading position from high performance computing (HPC) and Exascale into high growth markets such as analytics, AI and hybrid cloud. DDN has spent the past decade developing and bringing to market some of the most advanced technologies for data processing at scale targeted at on premise or hybrid cloud environments, including DDN's SFA OS Big Data embedded software, its distributed cloud and object technology, and more recently its IME software suite for flash, NVMe and GPU acceleration. The acquisition of Intel’s Lustre file system capability is a bold move that combines the most advanced file system technology with DDN’s already substantial HPC, analytics and cloud product portfolio Enhancing Lustre’s usability The acquisition of Intel’s Lustre file system capability is a bold move that combines the most advanced file system technology with DDN’s already substantial HPC, analytics and cloud product portfolio. “We are very pleased to acquire from Intel all assets related to the open-source Lustre file system and to welcome into the DDN family an experienced software development team for which we have always had tremendous respect and admiration,” said Alex Bouzari, DDN Founder and CEO. “Over the next few years, we are going to invest significant resources to enhance usability and to broaden Lustre’s capabilities and feature set in the direction of flash-enabled performance, analytics, enterprise and hybrid cloud.” Best-in-class parallel file system technology Deployed in thousands of data centres in healthcare, energy, manufacturing, financial services, academia, research and HPC labs, and consistently earning the number one spot as the file system of choice for the world’s fastest computers, Lustre has long been recognised as the industry's most advanced parallel file system technology. “Over the past few years, Intel has enhanced the Lustre technology and contributed to a now thriving Lustre open-source ecosystem,” said Rajeeb Hazra, Intel Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise and Government, Data Center Group. “DDN has the expertise to provide continued development and seamless support for existing customers. Intel will continue to participate in the Lustre community and collaborate on open source technologies that enable our strategies and products.” Lustre underpins leading deep learning and AI environments for autonomous vehicle development, supports the most demanding workflows in the life sciences and energy sectors" Powerful commercial cloud analytics DDN will operate the Lustre team as an autonomous division within DDN, ensuring full and sustained support of the Lustre customer and partner ecosystem. The division will be run by industry veteran Robert Triendl, Senior VP at DDN, who has been instrumental in growing DDN’s involvement in Lustre over the past decade. “Lustre users today are running some of the most critical and complex workloads in the industry. Lustre underpins leading deep learning and AI environments for autonomous vehicle development, supports the most demanding workflows in the life sciences and energy sectors, and enables powerful commercial analytics workflows in the cloud,” said Triendl. “This acquisition, and our continuing cooperation with Intel, will ensure that Lustre remains the world’s leading platform for compute and data-intensive workloads, scaling from small clusters running enterprise analytics to the world’s most powerful computer systems with tens of thousands of clients, while further expanding its capabilities in AI and Cloud.”

Genetec will also demonstrate the security solutions portfolio alongside its industry hardware and software partners at the event Genetec™, a manufacturer of unified IP security solutions, will attend the ASIS 2015 seminar in Anaheim, CA (Sept. 28—Oct.1) on Booth # 2639. The company will demonstrate its full product portfolio of security solutions alongside its many industry hardware and software partners, and will unveil new features for Security Center 5.4, its unified security platform that combines access control, automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) and video surveillance. This latest release will introduce advanced logical security and video encryption mechanisms, support for the H.265 video compression standard and the next-generation of the Plan Manager mapping module. Security Center 5.4 is expected to be available in Q4 2015 through Genetec™ Channel Partners. Enhanced security authentication and access Security Center 5.4 will introduce industry-leading security threat countermeasures, including new authentication and encryption methods to ensure that only authorised personnel can access their security system. To mitigate the risk of cyber-threats, such as man-in-the-middle attacks, organisations will be able to implement digital certificates to guarantee trust within the system and implement new levels of encrypted communications between all Security Center components. By establishing a secure and trusted connection, Security Center will be able to authenticate communications within the system, validating and ensuring that data and video are not exchanged with outside sources. This latest release will also allow organisations to leverage specialised third-party claims services, including Active Directory Federation Services, to authenticate and manage Security Center user credentials. New video encryption methods in Security Center 5.4 will offer advanced capabilities to ensure that live video streams and archived video can only be viewed by authenticated users, and cannot be shared with unauthorised individuals. Leveraging either AES-256 or RSA encryption standards, Security Center 5.4 will protect recorded streams, maintaining no unencrypted data, with enforced viewing permissions through the use of digital certificates. Reduced bandwidth consumption with H.265 integration This latest release will introduce advanced logical security and video encryption mechanisms, support for the H.265 video compression standard and the next-generation of the Plan Manager mapping module As organisations evaluate methods to reduce surveillance system costs and storage needs, the advent of the H.265 video compression standard promises to reduce bandwidth consumption by up to 50 percent, while also allowing them to leverage higher resolution cameras more efficiently. Security Center 5.4 is one of the first video management platforms that will offer support for H.265, and will provide integration to the Vivotek IP9171 H.265 camera. Additionally, through support for H.265-compatible video graphics cards, Genetec customers are able to benefit from the graphic processing unit (GPU) decoding to render H.265 streams more efficiently and reduce the processing load on workstation performance. Redesigned map-based command and control When responding to an incident, navigating through a large number of devices within a security system can be time consuming, particularly for operators overseeing multi-level buildings or distributed sites. Security Center 5.4 will launch a completely redesigned version of its native mapping module, Plan Manager, to assist operators in their day-to-day tasks, via a highly intuitive and visual experience. The new “Map Monitoring” task will offer a map-centric user experience, allowing operators to rapidly navigate their security environment, monitor devices and alarms, for easy system-control actions. In security operations command centres and control room environments, Plan Manager will be optimised to leverage video walls by enabling operators to span maps across multiple monitors. Genetec™ will welcome many of its hardware and software ecosystem partners in Booth #2639 at ASIS including: Camera partners: AXIS Communications, Arecont Vision, Bosch, Dahua, Oncam Grandeye, Panasonic, Pelco, Samsung, Sensity, Sony, and Vivotek; Access Control partners: ASSA ABOY, HID, Mercury Security, Salto and Suprema; Body-worn Camera partners: B-Cam and Zepcam; Infrastructure partners: BCDVideo, EMC, Pivot3, NetApp, Veracity and DDN; Analytics Systems partners: Kiwi Security, Briefcam, Agent VI and Prism Skylabs.

MorphoWave biometric access solution captures and matches four fingerprints with a single wave of the hand MorphoWAVE from Safran Morpho took the top honour at the Security Industry Association's 2015 New Product Showcase (NPS), winning the coveted Best New Product Award at the NPS awards ceremony at ISC West on Wednesday. MorphoWave is the market's first biometric access solution featuring high-speed touchless fingerprint matching. MorphoWave captures and matches four fingerprints with a single wave of the hand, for an efficient and comfortable user experience, according to Safran Morpho. Users simply wave a hand over the MorphoWave sensor to be identified. Because the sensor is touchless, the surface remains clean through repeated scans. It reads wet and dry fingerprints without difficulty, which is a supporting factor in its very fast and highly accurate capture and matching rate. SIA's New Product Showcase at ISC West "Each year, the companies competing in SIA's New Product Showcase at ISC West present the leading-edge security solutions that are shaping the industry," said SIA CEO Don Erickson. "These new technologies and solutions are the drivers that are moving the security industry forward, and I congratulate Safran Morpho on their win at this year's NPS." Since its inception in 1979, the NPS has been the security industry's premier awards-based marketing program. This year's NPS Program had 110 entries from 88 companies. In addition, the Judges' Choice Award was presented to IC Realtime for its IC720 360x360 Video Surveillance Camera product. The NPS judges presented awards in 25 product and service categories, and they also presented six honorable mention awards in six categories. The Award Winner’s List appears below, and it also will be posted on the SIA NPS website at http://www.sianps.com. 2015 NPS award winners Access control devices & peripherals Cypress Computer Systems / Cypress Integration Solutions OSMIUM Series OSDP Interface Module Access control devices & peripherals wireless HID Global HID Mobile Access Access control software and controllers IDenticard Access Control PremiSys Security Management Dashboard Convergence and integrated software and solutions Optigo Networks Optigo Integrity Fire/life safety Xtralis VESDA-E VEA Green / sustainable solutions products MicroPower Technologies SOLVEIL Surveillance System Hosted solutions CheckVideo HD Analytics Gateway Intrusion detection and prevention solutions Bosch Security Systems, Inc. G Series Control Panel Intrusion detection and prevention solutions wireless Interlogix ZeroWire Locks/safes/hardware KT&C KEES Mobile apps Honeywell Security Products Americas MAXPRO Mobile App Network support solutions Phybridge CLEER (Coax Leveraged Ethernet Extended Reach) Switch Outdoor perimeter protection Knightscope, Inc. K5 Autonomous Data Machine Residential and monitoring solutions NETGEAR ARLO Tools and hardware EverFocus Electronics Corp. Sidekick User authentication, identification, credentialing and management Zwipe Zwipe Access Video analytics NICE Systems NICE Suspect Search Video surveillance advanced imaging technologies Axis Communications Axis’ Zipstream technology Video surveillance cameras HD (megapixel) HauteSpot Networks Corporation HiveCAM Video surveillance cameras IP Samsung Techwin Open Platform Video surveillance data storage DDN Storage DDN - GS7K Appliance Video surveillance hardware and accessories Dotworkz Systems BASH All-Pro Video surveillance management systems Spectra Logic NVR3 Video Management Solutions

Strategic management of costs is important when considering video storage systems Costs are at issue when considering any component of a video system. Strategic management of costs is especially important when considering video storage systems because storage accounts for such a large cost component of networked systems. Gartner’s Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) As enterprise products begin to dominate the video storage market, more attention needs to be addressed to Gartner’s Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), says Jeff Burgess, president and CEO of BCDVideo. This concept takes it beyond the initial purchase costs, and also factors in management and support, the opportunity cost of downtime, and other productivity losses. “It’s especially true these days as more and more, video data is being analysed for business purposes,” says Burgess. “After all, they are counting on it to run their project. The video doesn’t get recorded if the recorder is not working or continually freezing up.” ‘Cost of power, pipe, and people’ Burgess urges integrators and end users to ask themselves: What is the video recorder really costing me over the course of the five-year project? It’s likely a racked solution, so in IT terminology that “costs power, pipe, and people.” “Take the people out of the mix,” Burgess says. “You should not need to roll a truck to the site every time there is an issue. Especially after a warranty service call. The system should automatically accept the replacement drive and bring the data over to it within the existing RAID settings, without the integrator’s on-site presence needed. The integrator really needs to look under the hood to see what else the system can provide other than simply being a storage box or a box of parts from multiple brands, not meant to work together.” Finding the right balance of control, performance, scalability and availability to keep up with and effectively exploit the surveillance data deluge allows organisations to avoid painful and costly upgrades Today’s intelligently-built video solutions provide the integrator with an easy-to-track cost savings over the lifespan of the project versus buying boxes on the cheap, says Burgess. “Today’s savvy integrator realises it doesn’t take many truck rolls to lose all those front-end savings, which are now eating away at their profits.” Camera with SD cards Another cost factor is to focus more on the utilisation of the SD cards in the camera. Utilising cards within the cameras creates a very inexpensive way of adding redundancy to a solution, says Burgess, who notes that most VMS companies can pull the video from the SD cards should there be an interruption in the network or at the head end. Educate yourself Veracity recommends asking a lot of questions to guide system design and minimise costs. What retention time do you need? What would you wish? Do you want to relay on video motion detection, or would you prefer to find a system that allows you to record low frame rate 24/7 and then increase frame rate on motion? Does your storage choice allow you to use low cost drives? Does it use a huge amount of power? Is it overly complex? “Educate yourself about the choices,” says Scott Sereboff, CEO of Veracity USA. “Look around. Consider the alternatives. You have a choice that does not include a RAID storage system with an $800-plus per terabyte price tag.” "Starting with a solution that takes minimal install and tuning, and is proven to scale well beyond current needs, future proofs the system for the short- and long-term for the customer and the integrator", says Jeff Adams, director of sales, surveillance solutions, DDN Storage solutions Balancing performance, capacity and availability Finding the right balance of control, performance, scalability and availability to keep up with and effectively exploit the surveillance data deluge allows organisations to avoid painful and costly upgrades, says Jeff Adams, director of sales, surveillance solutions, DataDirects Network (DDN) Storage solutions. “Performance needs to scale to allow for increasingly demanding playback and/or analytics features. Capacity needs to scale non-disruptively as cameras are added, while resolutions and retention periods may increase over time. Availability at scale is tricky; something as simple as slow rebuild times becomes critical in larger systems – endangering availability and system data integrity.” In addition to new installations, DDN does a healthy business in replacing underpowered infrastructures that deliver on the initial requirements but fail on scaling, says Adams. The most frequent culprits when a video surveillance site fails and needs a significant replacement/upgrade include: single controller architectures, silent data corruption, data loss from secondary failures during drive rebuilds, performance impact of rebuilds, alternates to RAID6 data protection, and lack of experience scaling into the petabyte or multi-petabyte range. Many mid-range video surveillance storage “solutions” take more than a week to install and tune, and cannot handle significant scale, adds Adams. For end users, this limits the ability to add cameras, capacity and demand (playback, analytics and system consolidation). For integrators, this means a lot of “care and feeding,” and frequent completion delays up front, as well as increased support considerations throughout the life of the project. “Starting with a solution that takes minimal install and tuning, and is proven to scale well beyond current needs, future proofs the system for the short- and long-term for the customer and the integrator,” says Adams. It also keeps costs low.

The fundamental value of data is widely apparent in modern society, and its loss may have significant consequences Video data is critical to today’s enterprise. The latest video storage systems must offer dependable operation that doesn’t risk loss of that critical data. DDN - When performance matters “Not only is bandwidth very important, but functionality cannot be lost when a storage system is having a bad day,” says Jeff Adams, director of sales, surveillance solutions, for DDN (DataDirects Network) Storage solutions. That importance is reflected in DDN’s motto: “When performance matters.” “If you pull a drive out of a running DDN system, the system monitoring tools will show you that the video data destined for those particular drives is actually being captured or journaled – not lost forever as with competing storage solutions,” says Adams. “When the drives come back online, the journaled data is written in a partial rebuild state as normal operations continue. This dramatically increases overall system performance, reliability and dependability in comparison to competing storage solutions that need to perform full rebuilds from parity each time a drive fails.” DDN systems are architected to continue delivering maximum performance even in adverse conditions, Adams adds. With DDN, entire drive enclosures can go offline while remaining operational with zero data loss. Importance of data recovery service A critical area that can be overlooked in video storage relates to the reliability and rescue capability of storage drives, according to Seagate Technology. The fundamental value of data is widely apparent in modern society, and its loss may have significant consequences; this is particularly true in an area where the maintenance of data is often strictly regulated. “It is crucial, then, that end-users take steps to ensure that the storage solution in their surveillance system is covered by a data recovery service,” says Henk Van Den Berg, Seagate’s European sales director. To ensure that such opportunities are exploited, the storage industry must work to communicate the available options in a way that clearly demonstrates how they fulfil the vast and specific needs of surveillance storage, he says. The storage industry must work to communicate the available options in a way that clearly demonstrates how they fulfil the vast and specific needs of surveillance storage Intelligent video recorders Dependability relates not only at the system level, but at the internal component level as well, says Jeff Burgess, president and CEO of BCDVideo. The integrator should not only expect, but demand, a scalable, stable solution that can be remotely managed, comes pre-imaged, ready-to-rack, and fully covered, he says – “and a manufacturer who’s got his back.” The technology capabilities of today’s intelligent Video Recorders (IVR) have turned the storage unit from a JBOD (just a Box of Disks) to a complete management and notification centre. In addition to capturing and redirecting the video streams, the system can alert the administrator on system fluctuations based on thresholds set by the administrator. This includes both those within the system – CPU temperature, cooling fans, and memory usage – as well as active peripherals attached to the network, such as network switch ports, camera activity, client viewing stations and video streams.  “We relate to all those insurance commercials promising a lower rate within 15 minutes,” says Burgess. “Notice how they never tout the quality of their service, just the fact that they can save you money in 15 minutes. But is that why you buy insurance? Don’t you really want it for if/when something happens? In that regard, what do you do when something catastrophic happens and you need to find that frame sequence, or restore and view the video from a certain date, yet you can’t because the data is corrupt or simply not there? Bet you wish you had those 15 minutes back.”

One key misconception is that solid-state drives (SSDs) are going to replace hard disk drives (HDDs) Like many areas of the security market, the field of digital video storage systems has its share of misconceptions and missed opportunities. We called on manufacturers of these systems to set the record straight. Hard disk drives (HDDs) will continue to rule One key misconception is that solid-state drives (SSDs) are going to replace hard disk drives (HDDs), says Henk Van Den Berg, European sales director at Seagate Technology. While it is true that the pricing for SSD is dropping, cost-per-gigabyte for HDD actually goes down as capacity increases – so a 3 terabyte drive is only $30 more expensive than 2 terabyte, for instance, while 2 terabytes costs almost $40 more than 1 terabyte. With SSD, because of the different economics of the device, twice the capacity typically means twice the cost. Due to these economies of scale, HDD will continue to win in the foreseeable future as the technology of choice, says Van Den Berg. “There also persists a widespread misconception that all HDDs are the same, which means that digital storage solutions are often selected based on cost alone rather than suitability – the storage equivalent of putting bicycle wheels on a Ferrari,” says Van Den Berg. “The bottom line is that without the proper drive, even the most sophisticated surveillance system could be rendered ineffective. “As the function of video surveillance evolves, so too must the technological specifications of video surveillance storage solutions,” he adds. An outcome of the one-storage-solution-fits-all misconception is that end users are missing a major opportunity to optimise the efficacy of surveillance systems One-storage-solution-DOES-NOT-fit-all An outcome of the one-storage-solution-fits-all misconception is that end users are missing a major opportunity to optimise the efficacy of surveillance systems, says Van Den Berg. As the uses of surveillance have expanded, the storage solutions available have similarly evolved, tailored to these new functions, he says. “The very first decision [you make] ought to be retention time and storage provider,” says Scott Sereboff, CEO of Veracity USA. “How many specifications are written with little or no thought? The end user needs to be educated on the way one choice impacts another. After all, if you choose 5 megapixel cameras and desire 30 days of retention, this selection may gut your budget. So you can only afford seven days of storage. You may wish you had understood the result of the decision prior to having made it.”  Knowing retention times, having an understanding of the effect that camera choice has on it, means that camera selection can be done with the overall goal (i.e., “30 days retention at 7 FPS”) in mind and achievable, he adds. Sereboff adds: “All storage is not created equal, and you don’t have to spend 50 percent of the budget to store your video. Each missed opportunity to educate, to sell with a consultative bent, is a missed opportunity at a wider sale.” Veracity’s COLDSTORE NAS device Veracity’s COLDSTORE is a NAS device, which comes out of the box and into the system as usable storage in 30 minutes to an hour. It uses off-the-shelf hard drives, requires very little power, and even a hard drive failure can be handled with no panic required, says Sereboff. “Storage has followed IT into the complex when it has needed to remain simple,” he says. “The users wants one thing – a reliable storage system that protects data when not needed and produces it when it is needed. As cameras and video management systems become more and more complex, storage needs to be simple, straightforward and something that the end user can point to and say ‘now that I understand.’ This gives the user licence to accept more complexity in other areas, to maximise the use of complex technology, while knowing that the storage systems, the foundation of the whole enterprise, is utterly solid and totally reliable.”It is surprising how many people still think that any network attached storage will work for video, says Jeff Burgess, President and CEO, BCDVideo. “Same with those using traditional IT servers for video,” he adds. “Storage of video is more intensive on the server or storage than traditional IT data. Video servers need to be built in a proper way to manage the bandwidth. Network attached storage needs to be held to the same standard.” "All storage is not created equal, and you don’t have to spend 50 percent of the budget to store your video. Each missed opportunity to educate, to sell with a consultative bent, is a missed opportunity at a wider sale", says Scott Sereboff, CEO of Veracity USA More drives doesn’t mean better performance Just because a storage system can physically expand to much larger capacities, doesn’t mean it can do it well, inexpensively, and with low management overhead, says Jeff Adams, director of sales, surveillance solutions, DDN (DataDirects Network) Storage. “Something we run into a lot is surveillance systems that fail because of scaling issues,” he says. “Anyone can add drives, but adding linear performance, availability and management scaling is something that requires a lot of performance-drive technology behind the scenes.” When video surveillance storage systems fail, Adams says the following reasons are most often cited: Drives kept failing and overall system performance tanked during rebuilds. More/higher resolution cameras are added. Playback requirements increased. Retention times increased. Video analytics are added. Local storage at each site was too expensive to maintain and scale. “All of it can be avoided by going with a consolidated storage platform that delivers full performance, even in outage conditions, and is proven to scale performance and capacity to accommodate increased workloads as well as data growth,” says Adams.