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StorNext also won its category at the Govies Government Security Awards competition, sponsored by Security Today magazine and securitytoday.com. The awards honor outstanding government security products in a variety of categories, including video surveillance data storage. An independent panel of judges from the security industry chose StorNext using criteria including features, innovation, user friendliness, interoperability, quality, design, market opportunity, impact on the security industry, technical advances, and scalability.
[mk_fancy_title tag_name=”h2″ style=”true” color=”#393836″ size=”14″ font_weight=”inhert” margin_top=”0″ margin_bottom=”18″ font_family=”none” align=”left”]Next Year, Look Out For StorNext 6[/mk_fancy_title]I should note that these industry accolades came just days before the newest version of StorNext was announced. StorNext 6 offers a number of new features that are of particular interest to the video surveillance community. New workflow enhancements to StorNext are designed to fit with existing ecosystem applications and tools, and are engineered to handle more complex streaming workloads. StorNext 6 enables collaboration on a global scale and supports users as their environments grow, with several key features for surveillance:
- FlexSync™ continuous content synchronization creates a replica of a source file system onto a remote, network-connected destination. FlexSync maintains continuous synchronization through metadata monitoring. FlexSync can create copies of surveillance data to provide an off-site copy of video content for data protection or distribution. This has the added benefit of protecting data from malicious acts as this feature also can have multiple “versions” if files are modified. FlexSync can be configured to run as frequently as every minute, providing a very short window before the file is replicated.
- FlexSpace™ multi-site shared archive uses Quantum’s unique software foundation to enable distributed, collaborative workflows, creating “stubs” to remotely archived files and using Amazon S3-based object store repositories. For environments where multiple geographically distributed users need access to the same content, FlexSpace provides a mechanism to enable those users to access the same content from a cloud copy without the need to replicate the data to each of the locations. Only the content that is needed is downloaded to the local system. This is advantageous for sites with limited network bandwidth between sites because it maintains access to all of the content.
- Client-based Quality of Service (QoS) enables bandwidth throttling to allow users to specify the maximum bandwidth permitted for a client. In addition, bandwidth reservation guarantees bandwidth for a client by limiting others. Within a security environment, there are multiple “workflows” that occur. For example, ingest of real-time video from cameras has different performance requirements than playback of previously recorded data. Client-based QoS can set up different systems to have the appropriate level of performance for their function, ensuring that the most critical (ingest) always has priority over other functions.
- Online stripe group management provides non-disruptive scaling with automatic redistribution. As surveillance systems requirements change, this capability allows for the storage infrastructure to change as well without disrupting ingest and other functions. Additional capacity can be added when needed—and more bandwidth can be added to an active file system to meet increased retention or performance requirements.
- File system auditing provides an activity trail of “what, when, and who” made changes to file metadata and the contents of the file itself. In a security environment, the ability to determine all the “touchpoints” for a file can be very important, both for investigative purposes as well as evidentiary validity of video content. StorNext now provides a higher-level of insight into the activity within a file system.
- StorNext Storage Manager enhancements, such as tier copy management, allow users to copy or delete age-off of any tier, including the cloud. This capability gives administrators the flexibility to effectively manage the tier in which data resides much more effectively and also choose which storage platform data will be retrieved from. Previously, all tiers were treated the same from a retention standpoint, and retrieves always came from the first copy regardless of the storage platform. Now, administrators can specify how long data resides on a given tier. For example, an administrator may want to keep data on tape for one year and in the cloud for three years. They also have the ability to specify that if a tape copy exists, then it should be used for retrieve, otherwise retrieve the copy from the cloud.
With these new capabilities, the surveillance team is already looking forward to next year’s awards.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]