Surveillance-grade edge storage receives a boost

Over 98 percent of all microSD cards sold globally in 2017 were used in consumer applications, according to IHS Markit¹. These consumer-grade memory cards are not designed and validated for commercial use in video surveillance applications. Micron’s industrial microSD cards are designed specifically for professional video surveillance use cases and include a three-year warranty for 24x7 continuous video recording usage. The Micron microSD card design and firmware is optimised to ensure a reliable, robust and low-maintenance system design that delivers 24x7 continuous recording capability with minimum video frame drops.

“Due to a lack of surveillance-grade solutions, organisations have relied on the use of retail microSD cards that are not optimised for 24x7 recording. As a result, these cards may fail earlier and also experience video frame drops as high as 30 percent²,” said Amit Gattani, senior director of embedded segment marketing at Micron. “With a strong industry trend toward more analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) in surveillance cameras, there is a growing demand for higher reliability and higher density storage in the cameras. Micron is addressing this need with industry-leading density of 256GB in a surveillance-grade microSD card.”

Edge Storage: Industrial-Quality Storage Designed for Professional Video Surveillance Applications

Micron’s industrial microSD cards are specifically designed for IP video surveillance workloads and feature:

• Storage densities of 256GB, 128GB, 64GB, and 32GB, which enable more video to be stored at the edge, giving system designers increased flexibility
• At least three years of high-quality, continuous, 24x7 video recording³ in a wide range of temperatures and environments
• Technology for the cards to self-monitor and provide information on card usage and expected useful life remaining for each card
• Special firmware designed for continuous video recording, which minimises frame drops and video loss
• A two million hours mean-time-to-failure (MTTF) or 0.44 percent annualised failure rate (AFR), which is equal or better than most surveillance Hard Disk Drive⁴

Customer Enablement and Market Opportunity

According to IHS Markit⁵, demand for professional video surveillance cameras continues to grow rapidly. It forecasts that over 130 million professional video surveillance cameras will be shipped in 2018, up from about 100 million in 2016. Following Micron’s release of increased capacities for their surveillance grade offerings, many leading professional video surveillance providers have adopted and deploying the solutions across their products with great success. 

“We are pleased that Micron is addressing the surveillance market with high reliability and high-performance edge storage products,” said Zhiming Li, product director at Dahua Technology. “Micron’s new 256GB industrial microSD card now enables use of edge storage as the primary storage in many SMB solutions and secondary storage in Enterprise solutions, enabling system integrators to optimise solution design, increase deployment flexibility and lower total cost of ownership.”  

“Surveillance cameras are now deployed everywhere in highly distributed environments like smart cities and smart infrastructure. Edge storage of video and analytics related data in the surveillance camera gives unique flexibility to system integrators in optimising the systems for performance and cost,” said Yul Pi, product collaboration director at Infinova. “Micron’s new ultrahigh density microSD cards bring the reliability and performance required for surveillance systems.”

“The IP surveillance market continues to grow rapidly across all verticals and has created a rising demand for high-performance and reliable video storage. Recognising this increasing need, VIVOTEK has deployed Micron’s new ultra-high density microSD cards in our products to provide effective edge storage based solutions for both SMB and Enterprise use case that enhance design flexibility and optimise system resources and total cost of ownership,” said Shengfu Cheng, director of marketing and product development division at VIVOTEK INC. “It’s important to adopt high-quality, surveillance-specific microSD cards, and we are pleased that Micron is leveraging its 3D flash memory leadership to deliver an optimised solution for this industry.”

"Small to medium businesses will drive significant growth in the coming years in the video surveillance-as-a-service market,” said Jon Cropley, senior principal analyst for video surveillance at IHS Markit, a global business information provider. “Currently, these organisations typically rely on backend recording solutions for data storage. However, an increasing number of systems are available that do not require local network video recorders. The emergence of high-density edge storage has played a major role in this.”

“Micron understands surveillance application cases, and launching ultra-high-density edge storage solutions based on 3D flash memory technology will change the way video is captured and stored in future surveillance deployments,” said David Huang, president of GeoVision, US division. “We view our collaboration with Micron as a way to leverage edge storage to improve flexibility in solution designs and deployments while effectively bringing down the total cost of ownership for our customers.”