The world of video surveillance is changing so rapidly that the user and the traditional suppliers are both in a state of frenzy. I think that within this transformation the role of enterprise storage providers is becoming increasingly critical. It is fairly easy to understand the increase in video surveillance. Post 9/11, enterprises as well as governments are all adding or increasing video surveillance to the security equation. Of course, casinos and banks have always been the leading users of video surveillance, but now everyone is in the game.

On a typical day, a regular person living in a city may be videotaped five or more places, as he drives to work (and passes through specific traffic lights), parks his car in the company parking lot, enters the building, makes a trip to the bank at lunch, grabs a couple of items at the local 7-11 and heads home. This represents an immense amount of unstructured data that has to be stored - securely and inexpensively.

We have engineered our DataValet solution specifically for scenarios like those facing the video surveillance industry. A DataValet cluster from Verari Systems delivers massive scalability for today’s fast growing unstructured data at lower price points than is offered by competing storage architectures. It’s also eco-friendly, providing the industry’s best power, cooling and floor space efficiency.

I think it is important to realize that the type of storage needed for video surveillance (and other unstructured data applications) will very likely be different than storage for other applications. For video surveillance the attributes that matter for storage include cost effectiveness and high scalability. In today’s environment, most everything  is IP based,  so making storage IP-based makes it easier to understand, manage and access. This fact makes DataValet ideal for not only Video Surveillance but also many other Web 2.0 applications.

This trend in the growing need for data stores for unstructured data is not going to slow down anytime soon. Luckily for you, we at Verari have planned ahead and can deliver the storage you need as you need it.

Keeping storage capacity ahead of demand is a core challenge to healthcare IT managers, CIOs, and PACS administrators.  The amount of storage needed per facility is growing at an alarming rate and all of this data needs to be highly accessible and secure.  This has lead, invariably, to more electronic-based information and clinical results which has resulted in a dramatic increase in the demand for secure disk-based storage. The growing nature of this need has also created a demand for a solution that is not only secure, fast and cheap but also extremely scalable.

Our solutions at Verari are ideally suited to these challenges and the management and storage of fixed content information.  DataValet, for example, can provide much faster response with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than traditional disk or tape-based archives. The healthcare industry is faced with unique challenges like having to store immense amounts of data permanently - that kind of demand has inspired us to come up with solutions like DataValet.

Verari storage systems have been designed to meet and exceed the requirements of the medical and healthcare industries; in addition to providing a highly reliable and scalable storage platform, our storage solutions provide accessibility, are completely scalable and include long term retention and lifecycle management of medical information. Additionally, DataValet addresses the security of data and the built-in replication and automated integrity checking that a long term archive requires.

DataValet goes way beyond tape, offline media and those early disk-based archiving products by including more capabilities, stronger security, faster performance and a highly affordable price point.

For more information on DataValet and our other storage solutions please visit us at http://www.verari.com/storage.asp

Storage Solutions for the Healthcare Industry

Scalable - Allows your storage capacity to scale as the demands grow.
Searchable - Our solutions allow healthcare providers to easily locate the healthcare information needed.
Secure - We take care of the information through a secure storage architecture that includes encryption and easily allows for users to restrict and track all access to healthcare records.
Accessible - Information is accessible when needed by authorized users so that critical healthcare information is available online and on-demand. Complex storage interactions and data access is simplified and easily integrated into business processes, applications and corporate and public clouds.

Television – it has been a standard in the American home for the better part of a century. Almost without us noticing it became the central source for entertainment and information in most homes. Over the last couple of decades that has shifted to the PC, or more precisely to the internet. People now more often than not turn to the PC for quick news and information because they can get exactly what they want, when they want it and (with WiFi networks) where they want it. Cable TV companies have tried to offer services to keep up with the “Google it and get it now” attitude of the internet with various on-demand and DVR type services. The inherent problem is related to the amount of smart programming required with the constantly changing, stream of consciousness type demands of the global consumer.

That is the idea behind IPTV (Internet Protocol Television). With IPTV there isn’t a need to figure out and program what people will want to watch or when they want to watch it because the user will decide what they want and when they want it - much like people already do on sites like YouTube or Google News. IPTV will ultimately marry your old, static television with the family PC, streamlining many core household functions. Bear with me here but it’s not too hard to look to a Jetsons like future (sans flying cars) with a terminal on the home network in every room – some playing games or shopping, some doing homework while others may be catching the big game or taking in a movie. 

All of this may sound like some crazy sci-fi dream, but at Verari we work every day to develop solutions that make this (and much more) a reality.  IPTV delivers digital television over a computer network instead of traditional broadcast and cable formats. IPTV also stands to make a major play in the enterprise environment - IPTV may be used to deliver television content over corporate LANs. The world, both at work and play, wants its information NOW – and Verari works to make sure that the infrastructure is there to deliver it. This impending boom for IPTV is causing service providers to rehash storage and delivery strategies. Verari’s networking, compute and storage solutions are engineered to be the backbone for IPTV and other Web 3.0 technologies.

When you visit the office of a large enterprise CIO, you will notice the same report or set of reports very visible in their office. Some have a wall with availability charts of all their data centers showing each location with the failure rates clearly visible. Availability is a fundamental and key criteria for enterprise CIO's. 

In addition to availability, energy efficiency is another key measurement that is a focus area. As the need for more storage continues to rise at rates over 100% and density becomes the main requirement. Density and availability challenge every CIO because energy efficiency is the enemy of both. 

The old rules-of-thumb are no longer sufficient for managing energy efficiency in mission critical facilities. Market-leading organizations are increasingly relying on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques in both Design and Operational Management of their modern data centers.  Efficiency (cost) for any data center is driven by the way that Total Power, Total Cooling and Total Space availability is utilized by the Owner/Operator, at any point in time.  To complicate matters, the IT load distribution within a facility changes over time, thus making operational efficiency and best use of total power available moving targets.  Furthermore, Owner/Operators have little or no control on the amount of power drawn by a piece of IT equipment.  This puts the cooling system at the forefront of any strategy to maximize data center operational efficiency. 

What's this all mean to the CIO looking at availability charts? It means that you need to look at new ways to measure your data center to understand the air flow and how adding new equipment impacts availability. There are sophisticated CFD techniques that can help analyze the data center and should be utilized.

Universities around the world are experiencing dramatic increases in “always on“ research capability and the need to offer cutting-edge applications . This places considerable strain on many of the older incumbent data center infrastructures. The need for more robust, powerful and efficient systems has left a number of institutions in a bind. Most universities have not planned for such changes and this disruption has strained budgets to have the resources to effectively remain competitive with other institutions around the world.

In a typical data center, density is restricted by both the cooling capabilities and the platform infrastructure. Space will always be an issue when it comes to data processing and storage. Verari Systems has taken steps to combat this with the BladeRack® 2 X- Series featuring our patented Vertical Cooling Technology™ which lowers TCO and space requirements while increasing performance. By utilizing Verari’s solutions universities can build an extremely efficient data centers with unrivaled density and maximum performance. In fact, the BladeRack 2 XM is the industry’s densest compute solution, supporting up to 96 blades housing 768 processing cores. That’s 768 cutting-edge processing cores running complex research equations or mapping DNA – anything top researchers need the muscle to crack – in just two standard data center floor tiles.

As I mentioned before some universities just don’t have the resources to improve their data centers. Or to be clearer, some universities do not have the immediate, discretionary income available to fund a new data center. Verari Systems counters this by providing a wide range of leasing and financing options designed to help organizations who find themselves in such a bind. We will even accept old, inefficient systems as a trade in towards new data center hardware that will save these schools money while attracting top researchers and grants. Our leasing solutions minimize the financial and technological risks that accompany a direct purchase.  We also offer a technology refresh program that protects the universities’ investment and lets them upgrade the equipment when the time comes to do so in an easy, planned manner.

I am constantly amazed by the amount of sheer data that we generate on a day to day basis. According to the International Data Group (IDC) 281 billion gigabytes of data was created in 2007 (up from 161 billion in 2006). This immense growth combined with growing environment concerns has created a dire need for ultra efficient, highly versatile and extremely dense blade-based storage solutions.

The “information superhighway” that was promised in the early 90s has come and gone, replaced by this exponentially expanding digital universe. The web has truly become the domain of the user, where everyone not only has a voice, but also a blog, YouTube account, FaceBook domain, online banking records and well, you get the picture. IDC estimates that this translates to approximately 45 gigabytes of data for every person on earth. Not only is that number growing but, obviously, so is the number of people on earth, expanding the digital universe even further.

That’s the first challenge to supplying the digital universe – the sheer size of it. At Verari Systems we have definitely taken up the challenge. Our FOREST container solution can provide just over 12 petabytes of storage capacity in a standard sized shipping container that is deployable nearly anywhere on earth. Our BladeRack 2 XL platform can support up to 672TB of storage capacity in just two data center floor tiles. Our nearest competitor can’t even come close to boasting that type of density. And the great thing about it is, like all Verari products, we have engineered these solutions to be the most efficient, resource saving products of their kind in the industry. Environment conservation is not part of our sales pitch – it’s the foundation of our culture and shows up in everything we do.

The second challenge to meeting the demands of the digital universe is the dynamic and diverse nature of the data. Each of our customers has a unique challenge and one size definitely does not fit all. With our new SB5165XL StorageServer we have the industry’s first high density, blade-based, all-in-one storage appliance that combines unified NAS and iSCSI SAN storage. This makes it an extremely cost-effective, easy to manage solution that is ideal for massive pools of unstructured data. For structured data that often requires extremely high availability we have our award-winning DataServer products which combine an ultra high density storage blade with a high performance compute node, eliminating networking bottlenecks and taking performance to new levels.