Seagate introduce SkyHawk AI HDD for AI-enabled surveillance

Seagate have introduced the first HDD created specifically for artificial intelligence enabled video surveillance, the Seagate SkyHawk AI hard disk drive. Building on Seagate's 10-year track record of optimized surveillance performance, The SkyHawk AI provides unparalleled bandwidth and processing power for data-intensive workloads, with the ability to simultaneously analyze and record footage from multiple HD cameras.

"The use of AI technology in surveillance is steadily increasing - both in the edge and backend installations such as retail fronts and large city traffic management. Seagate has led the surveillance storage market since its early days, a decade ago, by delivering industry leading HDD products that have enabled more than 5X increase in exabytes during this time period," said Sai Varanasi, vice president product line management at Seagate Technology. "We are excited to introduce smart, purpose-built SkyHawk AI solutions that expand the design space for our customers and partners, allowing them to implement next-generation deep learning and video analytics applications."

With forecasted growth from 27.6 million shipments in 2016 for video surveillance hardware, to 126 million in 2021, Seagate are providing the ideal solution for computational workloads that typically accompany AI work streams. SkyHawk AI can provide high throughput and enhanced caching to deliver low latency and excellent random read performance.

"As smart cities, smart transportation, and other surveillance programs become more prevalent, the number of surveillance nodes has reached the hundreds of thousands. Due to the widespread use of high-definition monitoring, the amount of data required in security surveillance has dramatically increased. The efficient collection, analysis, and application of data is becoming ever more critical," said Guo Xudong, deputy general manager of domestic sales & marketing, Hikvision. "We are excited that Seagate will launch the industry's first AI optimized surveillance drive which will enable us to efficiently manage data storage and processing challenges, including, but not limited to, our DeepinMind NVR series."

The concern with IoT and cloud-based data storage is security, Li Lin- vice president of Uniview, shares his concern and how Seagate's SkyHawk AI will optimize performance and add value to his clients.

"With the rapid advancement of IoT, cloud computing, and big data, we're entering an intelligent security era. AI is now prevalent in the security market and will be driving the development of the industry in coming years. Data storage is a key factor for surveillance and we believe with the SkyHawk AI drive we can optimize the performance of Uniview's systems and increase value for our clients."

Seagate's SkyHawk AI is available worldwide and backed by a 5-year limited warranty, with the 8TB capacity priced at $349.99 and 10TB at $449.99.