Jeff Briggs, Head of Sales – Enterprise, Toshiba Electronics Europe, sheds light on the company’s growing presence in the surveillance sector.
What challenges are currently affecting the data storage sector?
There are several dynamics that have emerged over the past 12-18 months which have caused challenges in terms of integrity of the product supply and made it more difficult to attend to customers’ demands.
The first of these was COVID-19 where we experienced product production facility closures due to community quarantine rules instructed by local governments. This was followed by the impact of Brexit, with shipment hold-ups resulting in delayed inbound shipments into UK distributors.
In recent times, we had an unexpected boom which increased the need for high density HDD data storage to enable cryptocurrency farming. Despite all of these challenges, we were able to continue delivering products to our customers, as had been originally committed, without lead times lengthening. This was thanks to the strong commitment from our production facilities and our careful inventory forecast planning.
Why should businesses consider looking further into Toshiba Surveillance HDDs?
Toshiba has been manufacturing HDDs for over 50 years and it remains a core business unit to our corporate portfolio. In late 2020, we released our range of purpose-built surveillance HDDs – named S300 and S300 Pro. These drives have been designed to meet the demanding 24/7 workloads and challenging operating conditions experienced within IoT surveillance systems to keep your data secure.
The HDD employed in surveillance systems will not generally have any redundancy built in to them, as to keep the overall costs involved down. Installers therefore need to avoid fault situations occurring as they don’t want to have to be sending staff back to the site to undertake repairs; this will impact heavily on their profit margins and could even mean that their profitability on that project is gone completely.
With the launch of the S300 and S300 Pro range, we have addressed our customers’ requirements to deliver data storage solutions with highly reliable and elevated performance whilst also meeting their objectives to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO). Since the launch of our surveillance range we have successfully increased our market share in the UK to a consistent 30% throughout 2021 (according to data from FutureSource).
This is really positive for our team as it not only demonstrates that our products have been accepted by the security channel, but we’ve also received feedback from working field results confirming that very strong reliability standards have been exceeded.
How does Toshiba add value to the security market?
Our primary goal is to produce highly reliable HDDs with consistent supply to the security market to meet our customers’ storage needs. However, we are always looking at ways to add value to the channel through creating new sales opportunities for our partners.
We engage closely with our distributors and integrators to help find ways to connect businesses – who have requirements for surveillance systems – to partners who can install solutions. For example, Toshiba is sponsoring the #REALINSTALLERS club, a program created by DVS to connect end users directly with local trusted surveillance installers.
In addition to this, we work closely with the surveillance ODMs who are producing the network video recorders and cameras too. We are constantly looking at how we can fine tune our HDD products to better fit with specific operational needs so that they can achieve the best performance.
How is Toshiba supporting green computing?
Green computing is an important global trend – and Toshiba fully recognises its importance. We are looking to support it from multiple angles. Firstly, our S300 surveillance HDDs are produced using a 5700 RPM spin speed; this helps to reduce the amount of energy consumed during recording, whilst still supporting 64 cameras/channel systems.
Secondly, for surveillance applications requiring more intense workloads, for data analytics, facial recognition and AI, we have our MG Series of enterprise drives. The HDDs in this series feature helium-sealed casings which reduces the friction resistance on the disks. Resultingly, less power is consumed and product performance is maximised with a 7200 RPM spin speed.
What are Toshiba’s future plans for the security market?
Our goal is to grow the business substantially throughout Europe over the course of the next financial year. As mentioned, we have already had a lot of success in the UK and we are performing well across Eastern Europe. We are still seeing strong uptake in the surveillance sector as a whole and we predict that this will continue for years into the future, so our business here is looking very healthy.
Our midterm plans in the storage sector are to remain focused on what we do best – produce high density, reliable HDDs for our customers. We are always pushing to create the highest density drives and are pleased to confirm we will begin shipping our 20TB CMR capacity drives in Q2 2022, with plans to release a 22TB later this year and up to 40TB by FY2026.
This advancement is down to our ability to leverage our proprietary recording technology, known as flux-controlled – microwave magnetic recording (FC-MAMR). With the ever increasing requirement for data storage, we can be confident that our HDDs will play a critical role in the future global storage market.
This article was originally published in the April edition of Security Journal UK. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.