>>My brother does some video camera installation work, and he heard a story about one of our local casinos.
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>>The casino uses HD video cams for surveillance. Every dealer has to stand or sit on an "X" marked on the floor, and is monitored by at least 3 cams from 3 different angles. Every player position is monitored by at least 2 cams from different angles. There are other fixed cams throughout the casino, plus various cams with remote pan/tilt/zoom that can be manually operated at will.
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>>A common standard for HD video is 24-bit 1920x1080i60. Raw data rate is about 180MB/sec; even with a typical MPEG-2 or equivalent compression codec, it's still 12-13MB/sec.
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>>The casino runs 24/7/365, so one HD cam will generate ( 12 MB/sec ) x ( 86,400 sec/day ) or a little over 1 terabyte ( 1TB ) per day.
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>>Here's where it gets interesting:
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>>- the casino has 900 cameras
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>>- they maintain 6 months' worth of data
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>>That's roughly ( 1TB / day / camera ) x ( 900 cameras ) x ( 180 days ), or about 162,000TB !
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>>Apparently they maintain a 6,000TB (6PB) SAN for video storage - that would be good for about a week. Heaven knows how they store the rest of it ...
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>>I'd guess our local casino would be pretty small compared to some of the ones in Vegas etc., too ...
>
>Wow - and I thought the data that the Large Hadron Collider would produce was a lot ... (estimated at about 300 MB/sec).

Here's an overview of CASTOR-2 at CERN: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1180830/files/hepix_Ponce.pdf

It's surprising that a casino can have data handling requirements comparable to CERN's LHC !