Video surveillance is a real sweet spot for iSCSI IP SANs

April 28, 2010 – According to an end-user survey conducted by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) late last year, 28% of the surveyed companies already use iSCSI. And if you factor in the companies that plan to use iSCSI, that number jumps to 52%.

As ESG analyst Mark Peters said in a blog post (see “iSCSI Adoption Continues its Upward Path”): “Not bad for a storage protocol that was dismissed by some as the equivalent of the poor kid from the IT housing projects a few years back.”

(ESG surveyed 1,488 companies ranging from 100 to more than 20,000 employees.)

According to Peters, adoption of iSCSI-based IP SANs is being driven largely by the surge in server virtualization deployments and IT budget pressures. But it’s also due to a widening of the use cases for iSCSI.

One of the hottest spots for IP SANs is in video surveillance. IMS Research recently completed a report, The World Market for Enterprise and IP Storage used for Video Surveillance, which predicts that the IP SAN market for video surveillance will grow at a CAGR of 66.7% between 2008 and 2013.

Drawing from the report (because I don’t know squat about video surveillance), IP video has traditionally been recorded on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers, digital video recorders (DVRs) or network video recorders (NVRs).

NVRs are optimized for video surveillance, but they don’t work well in environments with lots of cameras. Same with digital video recorders (DVRs).

The COTS server approach is inexpensive and reasonably scalable, but the servers aren’t optimized for video surveillance.

IMS Research analyst William Rhodes says that the three key reasons why IP SANs will take over in the video surveillance market are:

--IP SANs go beyond COTS servers with feature such as RAID, failover and virtualization.
--iSCSI is less expensive than Fibre Channel SANs.
--IP SANs can be used to replace COTS servers and NVRs because storage suppliers have recently incorporated the server running the video management software (VMS), creating a single boxed appliance.

Most RAID vendors are going after the video surveillance market, but Rhodes cites the following vendors as examples of storage suppliers that are particularly focused on the video surveillance space, both of which offer “server-less” IP SANs: Intransa and Pivot3.

For more information on the report or the video surveillance storage market, contact William Rhodes or visit the IMS Research web site.