With the move away from combustion engines towards electric vehicles (EVs), sales across the world have increased, and so has the expansion of its corresponding infrastructure. As charging stations become more widespread, new challenges arise- especially when it comes to protecting them and their customers. This is where smart video and video analytics come into play. To store, analyse and enable real-time alerts, these systems must come with an appropriate data storage infrastructure, providing capacity, performance, security and resilience for current and future EV stations.
Primed for success: Smart video and EV charging stations
An important component is a reliable monitoring system to protect the facilities. With the increasing number of charging points in both urban and remote areas, operators need to have an overview of activity at the sites at all times.
To pave the way for safety and success, EV station owners are turning to AI-enabled security cameras that offer innovative features, revolutionising the way operators protect their property. These smart video devices can help distinguish between natural elements, vehicles, animals and people, and can send alerts in the case of an unforeseen event or unusual behaviour. With the ever-increasing resolution quality from 4K to 8K and beyond, as well as new technology advancements like motion sensors, new cameras enable object tracking, which can also significantly reduce false alarms.
Over recent years, EV stations have become an increasingly attractive target for cable and battery theft, EV destruction and other forms of vandalism. Video analysis can help protect and prevent vandalism before it occurs or catch the perpetrators in the act.
These AI-enabled smart video systems do not only place new demands on the equipment, but also on the data storage infrastructure that is powering video analytics. Capacity, latency and bandwidth become crucially important when recording, streaming and analysing high-resolution footage to take quick action.
Data storage is fuelling EV charging station security
Storage is a critical component when unlocking the full potential of smart video data. When designing infrastructure, EV station owners need high-capacity storage at the edge in the camera, in the server or recorder, and in the cloud or the data centre that offers low latency, high performance, and quick scalability. Another important consideration in smart video is video and data retention time. This could vary according to regulatory compliance, redundancy and backup practices, or longevity or reliability of the storage solution. This means that any storage solution for smart video features should enable long-term storage without compromising performance while complying with data protection regulations.
Translating these requirements into reality, a 360° smart video camera recording in full HD at 25 frames per second (fps) for 24 hours generates approximately 2,5 TB of data over a specified retention period that is usually around 90 days. In order to have sufficient storage capacity for these daily streams, the backend must have at least 225 TB of space available. The maximum possible storage requirement just for monitoring these specific locations could be up to 21 exabytes (EB).
To meet these demands, EV station operators need a customised storage solution that supports these new AI workloads and associated storage requirements. As video analytics and deep learning for today’s intelligent video solutions are performed both on premises and in the cloud, it is important to provide a scalable, cost-effective, durable, yet high-performance storage infrastructure. EV station operators can obtain highly resilient on-camera storage of up to 256 gigabytes (GB) in the form of microSD cards at the edge of the network, supporting card health monitoring capabilities, pre-emptive storage management and reliability for continuous 24/7 high-definition video recording. Specially designed microSD cards such as those from WD Purple, can continue recording even if the connection to the network video recorder is interrupted.
For reliable storage at the core, decision makers should look to purpose-built hard disk drives (HDDs) that offer up to 22 TB of storage and are equipped with advanced features. These enable up to 32 AI streams for deep learning analysis within the system while reducing image failures. In addition, these HDDs, designed for intelligent video environments are also optimised to handle up to 64 additional single-stream HD cameras, allowing for easy scalability as requirements change.
An important part of this will be the right smart video infrastructure that allows operators to monitor and improve the security and functionality of their stations and also detect and respond to events in real-time. As part of this, video data and data storage will continue to fuel the potential in this industry to ensure safety, security and incident prevention.
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