Qatar’s HIA Manages Large Quantities of Video Data with Ease

Safeguarding the Arabian Gulf

Hamad International Airport (HIA) has been classified as a five-star airport by Skytrax, and is one among only five other airports in the world to achieve this prestigious status. The airport is also ranked the Sixth Best Airport in the World as recognized by the 2017 Skytrax World Airport Awards. Currently, the airport has the capacity to handle 8,700 passengers per hour, more than 30 million passengers a year, and is undergoing further expansion to accommodate more than 50 million passengers. HIA is strategically located at the crossroads of the East and West halves of the globe, serving more than 150 destinations across all continents. Around 80 percent of the world’s population is within a six-hour flight of HIA, positioning the airport as the gateway to Qatar, the Gulf, and to the world.

Video Cloud with Distributed Storage Gains Popularity

HIA currently has over 10,000 installed CCTV cameras, with significant increases planned as part of the airport expansion. HIA had been using legacy Network Video Recorders (NVRs) as its main storage, which they wanted to replace with high-performing, scalable, and reliable Network Attached Storage that could manage all of its video data at a cost-efficient price point.

Globally, video surveillance systems are moving towards HD and adding intelligent utilities and analytics into the mix. Customers are paying more attention to capture quality, responsiveness, processing speed, and application overlays. Customers also require solutions that can apply scenario-specific processes to their layouts instead of just ingesting and transmitting video and images. All of these require high-performance, scalable, and distributed storage systems which are an ideal fit for centralized video cloud management.

With its distributed architecture, Huawei’s OceanStor 9000 provides easy expansion and centralized management to satisfy HIA’s requirements. Huawei is the first vendor to use large-capacity disks (10 TB per disk) in its solutions for video surveillance. The solution leverages a high-density layout to store HD video on a single storage node. Huawei’s solution met HIA’s performance requirements and significantly reduced both equipment room footprint and power consumption requirements.

High Performance Puts HIA’s Concerns to Rest

HIA’s system performance requirements were very challenging. Individual storage nodes were required to support as many channels as possible. The airport also required POC test results and selected a vendor whose products could deliver the best performance, scalability, and capabilities.

In its minimum deployment configuration, the OceanStor 9000 uses three-node clusters and can support 1,200 video channels (at the same bit rate as the one on the live network). This means that each node supports 400 channels, without any frame loss.

OceanStor 9000 uses non-blocking check technology to support more concurrent video streams and ensure zero frame loss even with heavy usage demands. Intelligent file aggregation technology greatly enhances the efficiency of video and image storage and improves storage utilization, which meets the requirements for video recording, access, forwarding, and intelligent analysis. OceanStor 9000 also balances video access workloads evenly and manages resources dynamically, significantly improving efficiency of data handling.

Robust Security and Solid Reliability Earn HIA’s Approval

Unexpected events occur frequently at airports, and security personnel must be able to pinpoint the incident location quickly and bring up surveillance videos to assist in decision-making. HIA needed its storage systems to store video data securely as per the defined, yet evolving, video retention policy.

With Huawei’s solution, if an outage occurs on a node, the remaining nodes in the distributed cluster can still handle HD video from 1,600 channels without any frame loss. Test results showed that the OceanStor 9000 could provide superb performance, solid stability, and high availability even with high usage demands.

The distributed architecture of the OceanStor 9000 protects data among nodes and can withstand the failure of up to four nodes in a single storage system without disrupting business. Storage capacity and computing capability grow as more nodes are added, delivering linear increases in bandwidth and concurrency. The system uses an N + 2:1 redundancy algorithm, which can tolerate the failure of two disks in a node or one node in the system, to balance disk utilization while ensuring data reliability.

HIA ultimately chose Huawei’s OceanStor 9000 Video Cloud Storage Solution because of its high-density, large capacity design, best-of-breed performance, robust scalability, and solid reliability. Solution benefits of the video cloud include:

• A distributed storage architecture that provides central storage and management for video assets, lowering total cost of ownership by 20 percent.

• Single nodes that accommodate HD video from 400 or more channels, reducing the number of nodes required and simplifying management complexity.

• Advanced data protection technologies and high-availability architecture, ensuring zero frame and data losses.

Huawei’s video cloud storage places video, images, audio, and other types of data into one system for centralized management and access. The system supports a single namespace with a capacity of 100 PB, fulfilling the technical requirements for a video surveillance platform as well as its capacity expansion needs over the next five years. OceanStor 9000 delivers future-proof video analysis capabilities and a unified platform for efficient video data analysis.