Day: May 6, 2019

Computer storage systems have seen a massive evolution and transformation over the last 100 years or so. These changes have been dramatic in relation to the size, price and the access speed of storage. These changes have been possible due to the rapid advances in technology, which was initially slow and took years to evolve but later in the last decade it accelerated due to rapid innovations and concerted/ collaborative efforts of the industry giants. These technology advances have revolutionized the way companies, businesses and consumers use storage technologies today – from the most ubiquitous smart phone devices and personal computers all the way to businesses which now have come to rely more on cloud storage services. In this article we try to capture the evolution of storage technologies over the years and examine the fundamental technical reason that has accelerated storage evolution over the last decade. Storage evolution over the last 70 years (Relative to size, capacity and price) The table below highlights the trends in storage. Initially, the advances in technology were slow, mostly led by IBM in the 60s and 70s in the Megabyte revolution. In the 80s and 90s other companies jumped on the storage bandwagon and started the Gigabyte revolution soon to be followed by the Terabyte revolution. Today there are many physical form factors of storage devices from the traditional mechanical hard disk drives (HDD) to non-volatile memory (NVM) or solid-state devices (SSD); however, the fastest and most dynamic revolution is occurring in the cloud. Storage technology evolution over the last 100 years (Another view) There is another view of understanding the evolution of storage technology as well. The diagram below is a pictorial representation of the other view how storage technologies have evolved over the last 100 years. The fastest growing storage technology today Today, most storage systems use some or the other form of a mechanical device for storage which is otherwise known as ‘hard disk drives’ (HDD). HDDs are the dominant technology for several reasons such as very high recording density per platter, more than one platter per HDD, higher rotational speeds up to 15000 RPM for enterprise class drives, and reduced costs due to economies of scale. However, they do have inherent disadvantages for the following reasons – further recording density increase has hit the limits of the physical space, increasing the rotational speed of the platter increases the cost exponentially, and being a mechanical device it is bound to physically fail due to all the moving parts. A single HDD with a single platter at 15000 RPM can at most deliver a transfer speed of 100MB/s for sequential block reads, and for the random reads for the same configuration, transfer speed drops down to as low as 10MB/s Given the inherent limitations of mechanical storage devices and the rapid drop in prices of non-volatile memory (NVM), NVM is the next revolution in storage. It is found in almost all mobile devices and now continues to replace mechanical devices across the board. There are several reasons for this – they are now cost competitive with HDDs per terabyte of storage capacity and this price parity will continue to erode in favor of NVM in the coming years; NVM technology is far more reliable in the longer term because it has no moving parts; NVM is over 100 times faster than HDD and has similar transfer speeds for both sequential and random reads/ writes unlike HDDs; and micro-second read/ write latency compared to milli-second latency for HDDs. Companies like Intel and Samsung have now developed NVM technologies that are 3 dimensional – it means increased storage density per cubic measure of volume without any performance degradation. The first system implementations of NVM were found to be SSDs that use the serial ATA protocol or SATA. The reason behind this is very simple. They achieve a 100-fold increase in transfer speeds relative to HDD immediately, without changing the upper level small computer systems interface (SCSI) protocol. The SCSI protocol is over 4 decades old and is used by all I/O protocols such as fiber channel etc. All major operating systems also support the SCSI protocol. So for the industry’s quick gain, it was easy to replace the HDD with an NVM based SSD. The next disruption was soon born because the SCSI protocol and its associated software stack were very heavy as far as execution time was concerned. The SCSI protocol overhead directly impacted latency of reads and writes which is detrimental to high performance applications such as high frequency trading, small transactions in banking, and numerous database applications for machine learning and artificial intelligence. Thus, an industry working group was formed to address the latency problem associated with the SCSI proto col. The industry came up with a new protocol which takes advantage of the native speed of NVM. They completely eliminated the SCSI protocol to define a new protocol called NVMe (Non-Volatile-Memory Express). In this protocol, the NVM device is directly attached to the I/O PCI express bus – and hence the extension ‘e’ in NVM. This eliminates the need to have the traditional hardware and firmware that resides in a host bus adapter (HBA) along with HBA itself. The following diagram illustrates this concept. Latest NVM highlights PCIe Gen1 is 2.5gbps per lane per direction. Today’s SSDs pack Gen3x2 or Gen3x4 (8Gbps x 2 or 4 lanes = upto 32Gbps) bandwidth in a very tiny M.2 gumstick form-factor. 3-D NAND and 3D-Xpoint NAND, DRAM-bandwidth at flash-economies, very low-latency flash (20us IO read/ write) latency compared to 200us latency for enterprise flash. New form-factor coming to pack TB of capacity – ‘ruler’ form factor from Intel. NVMe enables performance scaling with the increase in capacity – traditionally denser HDD did not bring any performance improvement. NVMe over TCP enables low-cost SAN deployment compared to Infiniband, RoCE, iWarp or FC. NVMe allows dual-ported drives providing high-availability (same PCIe connector for either gen3/ gen4x4 or 2 separate gen3/ gen4x2 links); and…

Video surveillance cameras are the electronic eyes of a security operation. In the past, human supervision was needed to make sense of the images captured, and to assess whether certain captured events are posing any security risks or not. With some organizations using hundreds or even thousands of cameras, manual review of footage is simply impossible, leaving them potentially vulnerable to security breaches. To help organizations overcome this challenge and to optimize their security, Hikvision has embedded advanced artificial intelligence technology into their surveillance solutions whereby their cameras, control room equipment and back-end infrastructure can ‘learn’ about potential threats for themselves by recognizing people, vehicles and even behaviours. Improving all aspects of security with ‘proactive’ detection and prevention The manual interventions needed with traditional security systems require teams to frequently react to the breaches which have already taken place. Artificial intelligence, however, has changed all this by recognizing potential threats before they impact company’s people or assets – allowing security teams to react immediately to neutralize any potential threat. For example, Hikvision artificial intelligence solutions can automatically trigger alerts when a person appears in a restricted area, or when a vehicle with a blacklisted number plate enters a site. With alerts delivered in real time, teams can identify and react to security threats and protect people and assets more effectively. As alerts are automated, potential threats are hardly missed or overlooked. How does Artificial Intelligence work? Artificial intelligence systems have become more intelligent over time, building database of potential threats and reacting to new events accordingly. This allows systems to ‘think for themselves’ and to alert teams of any suspicious events or people who are caught on camera. Hikvision’s artificial intelligence technologies use advanced algorithms based on deep learning to distinguish between different kinds of security events and threats. Technologies incorporated into the Hikvision portfolio include: Facial recognition: It allows law enforcement personnel to identify suspects and commercial teams to identify VIP customers in real time. Vehicle identification: It can be used to identify vehicle number plates, and recognize different types of vehicles (including make and model), or to trigger alerts when vehicles enter restricted areas. Perimeter protection: It helps organisations to identify real threats by distinguishing people and vehicles from other moving objects and keeping false alarms to a minimum. Business intelligence: It employs people counting, queue detection, and heat mapping technologies, so that organisations can enhance operational efficiency by making use of the data report. Why is Artificial Intelligence great news for businesses? Artificial Intelligence isn’t just useful for identifying security threats – although that is a key strength of the technology – it can also help organisations increase their competitiveness and commercial success. For example, VIP customers who opt to participate in special marketing promotions or other incentives can be identified so staff can provide the right kind of service at the right time. This gives organisations the opportunity to personalise the service experience, foster loyalty and maximise customer lifetime revenues. In the same way, artificial intelligence can help organisations better understand customers and meet their needs more effectively – leading to more commercial opportunities. One feature i.e., people counting allows stores and commercial centres to map footfall at peak times, ensuring that staffing is optimised to meet demand. At the same time, stores can see which areas of the building customers visit the most, and adjust their merchandising and product positioning accordingly to maximise the sales opportunities. Hikvision: An Artificial Intelligence pioneer Hikvision has created a family of artificial intelligence products to maximise the benefits for organisations such as the DeepinView network cameras and DeepinMind NVRs. The products help to tackle security with facial recognition, monitoring and counting of people, and recognition and detection of vehicles, to name a few. These features depend on artificial intelligence technology to recognise, classify and respond to security threats.