Western Digital Fuels Growing AI-Enabled Video Recording Systems Market With Expanded Family of WD Purple Solutions

Enabling customers to design and build solutions for a variety of smart video workloads, Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) announced its expanded family of WD Purple™ storage solutions, including the industry’s highest capacity 18TB* surveillance HDD for DVRs, NVRs and analytics appliances, and the 1TB* WD Purple SC QD101 microSD™ card for AI-enabled cameras. Setting the bar for smart video applications, all WD Purple drives are optimized to help reduce frame loss and pixelation, improve overall video playback and enhance streaming for 24x7 workloads – from ingest to backup and long-term storage – as the industry broadens the use of deep learning and analytics. 

From commercial buildings to municipalities, businesses are accelerating adoption of AI and deep learning to enable automation and better efficiencies that ultimately help create a safer and better experience for employees, customers and communities. Deep learning algorithms, hungry for data generated by IoT and edge ecosystems, demand higher resolution for better accuracy, increasing the need for storage capacity in cameras and NVRs.  In its recent report, Video Surveillance & Analytics Intelligence Service, July 2020, Omdia states that shipments of cameras enabled with deep learning algorithms will continue growing at a five-year (2019-2024) CAGR of 67 percent, and NVRs enabled with deep-learning analytics will grow at 37 percent. Meanwhile, video analytics appliances shipments are expected to grow at 43 percent. In addition, a 2020 Western Digital-commissioned survey of North American security system integration companies found that 76 percent of them see video analytics and AI as playing an ever-increasing role in their deployments. 

Beyond Hardware

            Western Digital’s HDD firmware optimizations and data management capabilities for its WD Purple drives play a critical role in improving system capabilities as well as managing devices across AI-enabled smart video solutions. The combination helps improve performance, reliability, durability and overall better operational efficiency and TCO for customers. Western Digital’s AllFrame™ technology for WD Purple HDDs delivers extensive caching and streaming management techniques to help prevent data loss and keep up with ongoing stream management. Western Digital Device Analytics™, a software-based solution for Western Digital’s HDDs, provides monitoring and drive analysis to users, enabling them to detect problematic conditions on a drive and provides instructions for remediation before an issue occurs. 

WD Purple 18TB HDD  

Leading the industry in capacity for surveillance drives, the new WD Purple 18TB HDD is designed for NVRs and video analytics appliances as well as GPU-enabled devices that can deliver both real-time and post analytics applications. Offering 28 percent more capacity than the previous generation, the new 18TB drive has room to spare for storing video, reference images and metadata at the edge, to support more effective AI. WD Purple drives from 8TB to 18TB feature AllFrame AI technology that enables recording of up to 64 high-definition cameras, as well as an additional 32 streams for deep learning analytics. 

WD Purple SC QD101 1TB microSD Card

 This WD Purple 1TB microSD card is designed for AI-enabled cameras, surveillance cameras and edge devices, serving as primary or back-up data storage. It is based on Western Digital’s advanced 96-layer 3D NAND technology, and delivers a combination of ultra-high endurance with up to 500 P/E cycles and comes in 1TB, 512GB, 256GB, 128GB, 64GB and 32GB capacities*. Rugged and durable, the WD Purple microSD card is weather resistant, humidity resistant and can withstand temperatures from -25° degrees to 85° degrees C. In compatible cameras, the card health monitor provides installers and integrators with the ability to gauge the remaining endurance and preemptively service the card if needed.

Availability

The WD Purple 18TB HDD will be available in October 2020, and the WD Purple SC QD101 1TB microSD card is expected to be available in November 2020. 

Supporting Quotes: 

 “The new WD Purple drives are uniquely designed for the demands of edge and analytics security video appliances that will enable our customers to gain more insights from their visual data,” said Tim Palmquist, vice president, Americas, Milestone Systems. “As a leading developer of open and independent IP video surveillance platforms, we value our relationship with Western Digital and are pleased to be working together to provide data storage that can support AI and deep learning, as well as manage multiple streams as video resolutions rise.” 

“Leading the charge for the digital transformation of physical security for our customers worldwide, we count on strategic partners such as Western Digital to deliver reliable and high performing storage solutions,” said Martin Renkis, general manager Global Cloud Solutions Physical Security, Johnson Controls. “Every Tyco Cloud video surveillance solution runs on WD Purple today as it has for many years. As we continue to innovate with features such as cloud-based storage health monitoring and alerts, we will continue to count on Western Digital to deliver the advanced solutions our customers need. We make the world a safer place with Western Digital technology.” 

Eric Spanneut, vice president, Client Computing and Smart Video Business at Western Digital, said, “Working side-by-side with our customers and ecosystem partners gives us unique insights and focus on delivering solutions that are optimized for the most advanced security video workloads. AI is driving the need for more enhanced capabilities in drives to keep up with performance demands, especially as video resolution and the number of incoming streams increase. We are in a unique position as the combination of our software and expanding drive portfolio makes our solutions ideal for deployment into a multitude of smart video applications.”