Happy New Year!
Welcome to the first edition of PROMISE Tech Insight. We hope your 2026 is off to a great start!
In this inaugural issue, we focus on the crucial role performed by storage systems in AI-enhanced video surveillance technologies. In upcoming issues we will continue to explore the importance of storage performance and reliability with other AI applications used for data centers and enterprise storage.
The Rise of AI-Enhanced Video Surveillance:
A Game-Changer for Security - and Storage
In today's rapidly evolving security landscape, AI-enhanced video surveillance is transforming how we protect people, assets, and public spaces. These intelligent systems go far beyond traditional cameras that simply record footage for later review. By integrating advanced computer vision and machine-learning models, they automatically analyze video in real time—or from archived recordings—to detect, classify, and interpret what's happening on screen.
Imagine a security operation that no longer relies on teams of guards staring at walls of monitors for hours on end. Instead, AI does the heavy lifting: recognizing faces and vehicles, spotting suspicious behavior (a loitering individual, an unattended bag, or someone brandishing a weapon), issuing instant alerts, and even filtering massive archives for lightning-fast investigations. The result? Dramatically fewer false alarms, faster incident response, and a proactive approach to safety that was previously impossible at scale.
At its core, AI turns passive video into an active, intelligent early-warning system. It works tirelessly 24/7, identifying anomalies with remarkable accuracy while freeing human operators to focus on decision-making and response rather than endless monitoring. From crowded city centers and transportation hubs to corporate campuses and critical infrastructure, these systems are making environments safer, more efficient, and far more responsive.
This revolution in surveillance isn't just changing security operations—it's also placing unprecedented new demands on the underlying storage infrastructure. As we'll explore in this issue, the explosion of high-resolution video combined with continuous AI processing is driving massive growth in data volumes, retention requirements, and performance needs, reshaping the entire storage technology market in the process.
As AI becomes central to modern video surveillance, storage systems are evolving rapidly to keep pace. Today's cameras produce higher-resolution streams, more simultaneous channels, and a constant flow of analytics-ready metadata—all of which demand larger, faster, and more reliable storage. AI-driven monitoring also increases long-term retention needs, making scalability and performance essential. Our solutions are engineered for this new landscape, delivering high-throughput ingest, analytics-optimized access, and dependable multi-tier protection to ensure every frame—and every insight—is captured and preserved.
AI Video Surveillance Is Completely Rewriting the Rules of Storage
The explosion of AI-powered cameras isn't just changing what security teams see—it's fundamentally changing what they store, how they store it, and how much they need to store. The result? A perfect storm of new demands that traditional storage systems were never designed to handle.
Here are the seven biggest ways AI is reshaping the storage landscape behind the scenes:
1. Resolution and Frame Rates Are Skyrocketing
AI thrives on detail. That means 4K, 8K, and multi-sensor cameras running at higher frame rates are becoming the norm. A single camera can now generate 10–20× more raw data than five years ago, driving explosive growth in daily write volumes and forcing storage platforms to deliver far higher sustained throughput.
2. One Operator, Hundreds (or Thousands) of Cameras
Because AI watches every feed 24/7, organizations no longer feel limited by the number of human eyes. Campuses, cities, and retailers are blanketing sites with cameras—often doubling or tripling counts overnight. More cameras = exponentially more data, network traffic, and pressure on centralized (or distributed) storage clusters.
3. Metadata Becomes the New Gold
Every object detected, face recognized, license plate read, or suspicious behavior flagged generates rich metadata. This relatively small but ultra-valuable data demands lightning-fast SSD/NVMe tiers, real-time indexing, and powerful database or object back-ends—so investigators can search months of footage in seconds.
4. Retention Periods Are Stretching—Dramatically
When footage is instantly searchable by event, person, or vehicle, its value soars. Organizations now routinely keep video for 90, 180, or even 365+ days for investigations, compliance, audits, and even training newer AI models. That's pushing petabytes into active archives and reviving interest in tape, cold storage, and hybrid cloud tiers.
5. Write Endurance Moves Front and Center
Non-stop recording combined with constant AI re-analysis means drives are being hammered with write cycles like never before. Consumer SSDs fail fast in this environment—enterprise-grade, high-endurance NVMe is rapidly becoming table stakes.
6. Downtime Is No Longer an Option
When AI is your primary early-warning system, storage failure can mean missing a critical incident. Expect to see surveillance-grade platforms with erasure coding, dual controllers, multi-site replication, and predictive failure analytics as standard features.
7. A New Category Is Born: “AI-Optimized Surveillance Storage”
The industry is responding with purpose-built solutions that combine massive ingest bandwidth, low-latency analytics tiers, seamless scaling, and deep integration with leading VMS and AI platforms. This isn't general-purpose enterprise storage anymore—it's a specialized breed designed from the ground up for intelligent video workloads.
The bottom line: AI video surveillance isn't just adding more data—it's creating entirely new workloads that demand smarter, faster, tougher, and more scalable storage than the industry has ever seen.
AI Revolution and Video Surveillance Storage
The AI surveillance revolution is no longer coming — it's here, and it's permanently redrawing the storage landscape.
What started as “just cameras” has evolved into a nonstop, high-resolution, metadata-rich data engine that demands massive scale, blistering random-access performance, extreme write endurance, intelligent tiering from edge to cloud, and zero tolerance for downtime.
For storage professionals, this isn't an incremental upgrade — it's a fundamental shift in workload, economics, and architecture. The systems that win in 2026 and beyond won't be the biggest boxes or the cheapest spins; they'll be the ones purpose-built for petabyte-scale ingest, instant AI-driven search, and years-long retention without breaking the bank or the operations team.
One thing is clear: in the age of intelligent video, storage is no longer a passive utility sitting in the corner of the control room. It has become the critical backbone that determines whether an AI surveillance deployment delivers transformative safety and insight — or simply drowns in its own data.
The future of security now runs on the future of storage. Time to build accordingly.
Thank You
Thank you reading this first issue of PROMISE Tech Insight. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the content of this newsletter, please feel free to contact us. We welcome your ideas for content and presentation of this monthly newsletter.
Sincerely,
PROMISE Technology