Published on the 14/08/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Enterprises wrangling increasingly large volumes of photographic or video content could take a lesson from the way Queensland Police is managing its darkest evidence…
Video and photographic content on corporate networks is expected to soar as organisations develop applications allowing consumers and employees to upload content from smartphones or request video on-demand services.
Adelaide City Council already encourages residents to upload photos of graffiti or potholes in order to have them fixed, and service organisations are increasingly providing video on-demand training to employees.
According to Cisco, by 2017 69 percent of all consumer internet content will feature video, while video on-demand traffic will almost triple reaching the equivalent of six billion DVDs per month.
For organisations serving up that video or managing content this raises new storage and management challenges.
Queensland Police has just turned on a new storage platform able to manage up to a petabyte worth of content as it wrangles ever larger photo and video collections. In this case the police force is managing evidence needed for child protection and sexual crime prosecutions. With an estimated five million child exploitation images already on the internet, the evidence collected by police forces internationally is growing rapidly.
The challenge according to George Marchesini, detective inspector in the child safety and sexual crime group, is to deploy systems able to quickly provide access to relevant information often to widely dispersed investigators, and safely archive that material for up to 75 years.
While Queensland Police’s deployment of an EMC Isilon system, capable of storing up to a petabyte of information today, and scalable to 20 petabytes, is for a unique, and arguably very dark purpose, the technology lends itself equally to any enterprise which needs to securely manage large volumes of photographic and video material. According to EMC chief technology officer Clive Gold, a similar system has been deployed at Fox Sports to manage on demand access to its video content.
The challenge for Queensland Police has been compounded by the dawn of high definition and video content on the internet. Where once the police might have seized computers with 100 or 1000 images on them, Marchesini said that police were routinely seizing a terabyte of information at a time, representing hundreds of thousands of images which needed to be stored and analysed in order to identify victims, and then used to rescue children and prosecute perpetrators.
