It’s a common misconception, mostly propagated by TV and movies, that the important security surveillance equipment around you is still hooked up to an old VHS system being monitored by a sleepy guard who was around when VHS was the latest thing on the market.
Thankfully technology has since moved on with surveillance now incorporating all manner of new advancement, such as facial recognition, object detection and much higher resolutions compared to the grainy, blurry footage of old that you usually see being ripped off of a VHS cassette.
You need to look no further than right here in Johannesburg, South Africa, to see evidence of this. You may have noticed several new smart surveillance systems popping up around the country with just one company, Vumacam, claiming to have more than 2000 cameras live at the time of writing.
These types of cameras can pick up licence plates of cars to catch stolen vehicles, identify suspicious behaviour that may be linked to criminal activity, and catch evidence to help police persecute wrongdoers, all in an effort to create safer communities.
While any move to help mitigate crime in South Africa or any other country is good, it all comes at a financial cost. This new breed of camera not only needs more storage for its high resolution footage, but it also needs a storage solution that won’t fail at a critical juncture where lives may be on the line.
That’s where Seagate’s range of SkyHawk drives comes into the picture. Seagate has purposefully built these drives with surveillance in mind, giving them massive advantages over any other storage solution you can grab off of the shelves.
SkyHawk supports up to 64 HD cameras and utilises its own ImagePerfect AI to avoid dropped frames. This means that, should you slot SkyHawk into your AI surveillance system, you’re ensuring that both the capture and storage of your footage is smart.
As crime never rests and surveillance works best when it’s 24/7, SkyHawk is built to be running continuously. Seagate provides software such as SkyHawk Health Management (SHM) to monitor drive health and, should the unlikely happen and a drive fails, there’s the optional Seagate Data Recovery Plan.
To increase durability further sensors help these drives cope with vibration, a common problem in high density storage applications where dozens, hundreds or thousands of drives are stacked close to each other in a data centre.
This has become a problem in recent years as consumer-grade solid state storage, with no moving parts, has lead many people to not consider the impacts of spinning drives on their system.
If you’d like to find out more about SkyHawk or the rest of the Seagate family of products, make sure to get in contact with local company Regal Security Distributors.
