Building Smart Cities Starts with Smarter Storage

Smart cities are transforming the world, making people’s lives easier and more convenient. For instance, imagine a blocked lane in the road that snarls traffic for miles. In smart cities, cameras and sensors can automatically detect gridlock and change traffic signals to clear the area. 

Or imagine a prestigious trade show coming to town. Huge crowds of people can really slow down Wi-Fi connectivity. But in a smart city, free Wi-Fi around the convention center can be enhanced to meet visitors' increased bandwidth needs.

The driving force behind smart cities, and the biggest requirement to ensure they are providing useful functions and accurate insights, is data. And wherever there is digital data, there must also be robust data storage devices and systems. 

Intelligent sensors, cameras, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices collect an enormous amount of data that informs decision-making. While this data is collected at the edge, where these devices are, the data ultimately must be stored in data centers where these massive capacities of critical information can be managed, analyzed, and secured. 

It’s here where data is fed into AI/ML models to create actionable insights that allow humans to make critical decisions in the moment and at scale.

A city’s ability to meet various storage requirements and make data available at the moment to various applications is vital to making smart cities work for their citizens.

Architectural Changes Will Help Empower AI Workloads

Smart video solutions are a critical tool in gathering intelligent data, gaining insights, and delivering positive outcomes across a city system and services. But beyond video, smart cities also rely on a variety of other data types from sensors, alarms, and other IoT devices. 

These datasets feed security, safety, traffic management, energy management, sanitation, and just about every municipal system. It can be structured or unstructured data. It can be used to train models or make predictions. It can trigger alarms, notifications, and other automated actions. And it can be used to make best-recommended actions – automatically or by humans.

High-capacity hard disk drive (HDD) solutions provide the foundation for data storage at the edge, as well as extensive data lakes that store the massive volumes of datasets that are used to train models or for archival purposes. These drives ensure cost-effective, reliable storage that scales to meet the growing demands of modern data-driven applications, from real-time analytics at the edge to long-term retention in centralized data centers. 

With innovations like energy-assisted recording technologies and advanced durability features, HDDs are optimized to handle the continuous write-heavy workloads of edge environments and the high-capacity requirements of data lakes, making them indispensable for managing the lifecycle of data in today’s connected world.

Evolving compliance requirements may also play a factor in determining storage requirements. New privacy, transparency, and reporting regulations put varying mandates on how data is handled, who has access to it, and how long it can or has to be stored.

Not Your Father’s Storage Infrastructure

New storage requirements are overwhelming traditional storage environments. It’s no longer enough to build a central data center and expect legacy drives to be able to handle modern storage requirements. Smart city capabilities are evolving quickly – getting more powerful and sophisticated than anyone thought possible just a few years ago. 

Camera resolutions continue to increase, which means more capacity is needed. The kind of deep analytics being conducted is expanding at a rapid pace. And technical innovations that enable new use cases are being developed all the time.

An inability for legacy storage environments to keep up with smart city data storage requirements can be extremely disruptive for users, citizens, and visitors. Reliability issues can slow decision-making or even bring applications to a stop. 

Inefficiency wastes valuable time and resources, hindering efforts to achieve new sustainability goals, while inconvenience can negatively influence public perception of government services and their effectiveness. Budgets, quality of life, and even lives could be at stake. Smart cities need smart data storage devices and solutions.

It’s also important not forget about resiliency and disaster preparedness. Access to reliable data in real time allows AI models to provide early warning to citizens, provide context for first responders, and streamline evacuation planning. 

Storage architects need to make sure the city’s critical data is safeguarded through effective backup and disaster recovery. These can be deployed in a geographically remote data center or in the cloud. Or better yet, both.

Interconnectedness is also a critical requirement for smart city systems. Sharing data between systems is essential to cross-department coordination and other cooperative initiatives. The ability to access multiple datasets enables automation across systems, streamlining processes and workflows while providing additional insights. 

Of course, security of data is often a concern, so it’s important to make use of the security capabilities within storage devices and ensure strict data access control to help safeguard data.

Looking Ahead to the Future

Smart cities aim to enhance our lives by offering greater convenience and enriched experiences through data-driven automation and informed decision-making. Having a storage environment that meets the diverse needs of a variety of data types, formats, and use cases is critically important to the success of these initiatives. 

Citizens need to trust that their city is working in their best interest and spending tax dollars wisely. Ensuring smart city systems have access to the information they need will go a long way toward getting citizen buy-in and support to continue to innovate and make our lives better.