Seagate SV35 BlueStar Optimizes Its DVR Surveillance Capability With the Seaga - Page 2

BlueStar Optimizes Its DVR Surveillance Capability With The Seagate SV35 Series Drive BlueStar has invested a significant amount of some of the hard drives would even fail to be research and development effort into optimizing recognized when the SDVR was turned on. There surveillance devices-and it is certainly paying was also a wide disparity when it came to wake- off. By focusing on ease of use, high resolution up and sleep times. As Yang explained, "Our and high reliability, BlueStar's surveillance digital major clients have high requirements for stability video recorders (SDVR) assist in maintaining of the DVR products. Faulty hard drives are the public security and safety in transportation, main cause for instability in the SDVR machine." office, community, law enforcement, military, entertainment and-especially-the banking industry. Faced with these challenges, BlueStar set out to find a hard drive from a single manufacturer that would provide reliable and consistent Customers of BlueStar's surveillance solutions, performance for its SDVRs, against the harsh especially in mission-critical environments requirements of the SDVR environment. With this like the banking sector, need the provision of in mind, Seagate provided BlueStar with the ideal 24x7 availability and operation. Balancing the solution that would meet all its needs. numerous priorities and features that need to be built in, against the harsh and cramped Designed to Provide 24x7 Reliability environments where installation takes place, proved challenging for BlueStar. Choosing the correct hard drive made the difference between producing a reliable and high-performing security asset or an underperforming loss-maker. Yang Yunfei, Product Development Department manager at BlueStar elaborates further, "Our customers depend on surveillance DVRs for 24x7 protection and safety. If we cannot provide them with 24x7 reliability, the customer is vulnerable to consequences resulting in business and monetary loss. This is why we strive to ensure that our DVRs are highly reliable, and also why we considered Seagate, which provides industryleading reliability." The Seagate SV35 Series drive is optimized from the ground up to provide the highest performance for surveillance DVRs. For BlueStar, the surveillance-optimized features were of immense value. For instance, the SV35 Series drive allows the customization of the hard drive for video or data payloads according to the needs of the device. This is made possible through ATA-7 streaming command support. Since surveillance recording involves more writes and less reads as compared to normal PC hard drives, the SV35 Series drive will offer greater data integrity, thereby allowing the recording of multiple streams of video simultaneously without increasing the chance of drive failure in a high-duty write cycle Surveillance Environment Challenges environment. When it came to designing its SDVR devices, BlueStar faced several constraints. First, BlueStar had to design its SDVRs in as tight a chassis as possible. Faced with a small footprint, the design of the air ducts had to be factored in to avoid the device overheating. On top of this, each machine would usually have eight hard drives installed, so the design would have to compensate for the event of any shocks that occur. Provisions for the The Seagate SV35 Series drive also provides large storage capacities up to 500 GB, allowing BlueStar to configure SDVRs based on the different needs of its customers. With these large capacities, customers can record months of highquality, continuous video recording in 720x480 frame resolution, at 30 frames per second in MPEG4 compressed video before the need to erase or archive video arises. direction of airflow to prevent overheating also To help customers further reduce costs, the had to be factored in. SV35 Series drive is designed with innovative power-optimization features that reduce power There were also performance issues with the consumption and lower heat dissipation. By using previous hard drive units that BlueStar deployed low-cost, high-efficiency power supplies and in their systems. BlueStar found that the drivers enabling system spin-down support that sends in its SDVR devices could not recognize all of the drives into low-power sleep mode when inactive, hard drive units. The fact that they were made the DVR is less prone to overheating and features 2 up of different brands did not help. Periodically, a less complicated air duct design.