Three storage hardware devices, a cash raise and Oracle gets blocked

It has been a hardware frenzy this week, with a pair of microSD cards for surveillance cams, flash drives for video takers and makers, and good old filers from a NAS baker. These were accompanied by cash-raising from Sphere3D and Oracle adding block support to its cloud-based Linux Storage Appliance. We'll start with the …

[Empire of the Pussycat]

"Really? In the cameras themselves? That’s kind of hard to believe. "

yes, really, plenty of these being deployed for instance...

https://meraki.cisco.com/products/security-cameras/mv12n

...as well as the earlier generation

they're not perfect, and moving storage/analytics to the edge is not the best for all applications, but where it makes sense there's real benefit to eliminating back-end systems which need deploying, space, power, managing and maintaining

[Korev]

Re: "Really? In the cameras themselves? That’s kind of hard to believe. "

If you're running some kind of cloud-based solution then it makes a lot of sense to push the processing the clients so they pay for the electricity and potentially lower the incoming bandwidth.

[bish]

Re: "Really? In the cameras themselves? That’s kind of hard to believe. "

I found the disbelieving tone quite hard to believe. As you've said, it's really not so novel an idea.

[Pascal Monett]

"We’re going to see surveillance video cameras get a whole lot smarter"

I'm guessing we're going to see them get a whole lot bigger as well, then.

Because smarts is based on data these days, not on AI, so they're going to need some sort of data storage. Even SSDs will add some bulk to a camera that doesn't have storage now.

[Steve Foster]

Re: "We’re going to see surveillance video cameras get a whole lot smarter"

Not with 256GB MicroSD cards available (and getting bigger next week, no doubt)...

Finding/creating space to fit several of those within a motorised tilt/rotate mounting would not actually be overly difficult.

[MasterofDisaster]

Cameras are becoming better attack surfaces

Trend Micro reported last year that 51% of cameras they tracked in North America had one or more malware agents present (mostly undetected). More smarts in the cameras might mean better cyber-protection for them, but might also make them a lot more attractive (and effective) as attack surfaces. Combined with most cameras being maintained by physical security staff (and not IT), will be interesting to see how the hackers exploit a lot more horsepower.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Cameras are becoming better attack surfaces

I've gotten around that by using plain old dumb wired cameras attached to a completely and utterly air-gapped DVR. (It's so air gapped that I have to dig out a monitor and a ladder to get any information out of it!)