WD expands smart surveillance storage lineup

Western Digital has announced the expansion of its WD Purple family with the WD Purple Pro product line for a new generation of advanced AI-enabled recorders and back-end servers. 

The worldwide video surveillance camera market is estimated to grow to $44 billion by 2025, up from $23.6 billion in 2019, according to IDC. Emerging smart video architectures that capture, store and analyse massive amounts of video data, and perform heavy deep-learning video analytics, are putting an unprecedented level of stress on storage subsystems. The new WD Purple Pro line is designed to handle these workloads with optimised storage performance, capacity, workload capability and reliability for a myriad of devices, including AI-enabled network video recorders (NVRs), video analytics servers, storage arrays and storage/server solutions, including those that perform deep-learning analytics.

Brian Mallari, director of marketing for smart video, Western Digital, says “With the addition of WD Purple Pro, our full portfolio of smart video products covers customers’ needs from dedicated WD Purple microSD cards for cameras to WD Purple hard drives for mainstream NVRs and the new generation of smart video architectures, where the ‘smart’ of the solution starts with the brains at the back-end – the servers that perform video analytics and heavy computational deep learning. WD Purple Pro is the ideal solution to enable original equipment manufacturers and integrators to evolve their systems for emerging AI workloads.”

WD provided the following information on benefits of the new Purple Pro hard drives:

• Enhanced AllFrame AI technology enabling video streams from up to 64 HD cameras to be recorded concurrently, while simultaneously handling up to an additional 32 AI streams for AI functions, whether cameras are directly connected to advanced recorders or to cloud-based servers.
• High performance and workload capability, supporting up to 550TB a year workload rating, provides for the additional demands of AI functionality, including pattern matching and object/event recognition, while writing a multitude of video streams.
• High reliability and capacity solutions help retain and feed thousands of hours of training video to enable effective deep-learning and AI algorithm development. Capacities range from 8TB to 18TB with a five-year limited warranty.
• Enterprise-class durability to work seamlessly in large-scale, high-density video analytics servers and cloud solutions. Offers ongoing HDD health monitoring in compatible systems with Western Digital Device Analytics support.

“Western Digital’s new WD Purple Pro, AI-ready high-capacity solutions offer the performance needed for data-heavy workloads and provide the reliability our customers need to store their critical data,” says Dave Nieweg, community program manager, Milestone Systems. “Whether providing more secure access to a building or school, monitoring patients, or capturing and analyzing smart city parking and transportation data for safety and efficiency, offering users a trusted storage solution from the cameras at the endpoints to the cloud is essential.”

Western Digital’s full family of WD Purple solutions for smart video surveillance includes 1TB WD Purple microSD cards for cameras and edge devices to 1TB-8TB WD Purple HDDs for NVRs; and now, WD Purple Pro drives from 8TB to 18TB to support a range of systems for AI-heavy workloads, including back-end enterprise servers. WD Purple Pro solutions will be available this quarter from Western Digital resellers.