CCTV Storage 30TB - Your thoughts and suggestions please :-)

[lmgtfy]

We are looking at implementing a new CCTV server with around 80-100 cameras and to keep footage for around 30 days. According to my calculations we would need around 30TB of storage after raid to do this at the frame rates and quality of the cameras.

 

Speaking to the technical guys of the CCTV software (Luxriot) they have recommended local storage rather than NAS storage. We need about 30TB of storage after raid 5 so probably 36TB of raw storage.

 

Can anyone recommend a DAS or custom servers with this much storage for a reasonable cost? We were looking at building something ourselves and sticking some of the Western Digital 6TB SATA purple drives in but was interested to see what boards of hard disk arrays people have used and are happy with.

 

Server wise the specs don’t need to be great, we even have some old servers kicking around that would do the work but they lack the sata ports and raid 5 for the storage side. A dual core CPU something i5 or better, with 16GB of RAM would be sufficient.

 

We could stick a 8 port sata raid controller into one of our old servers has anyone used one before that they could recommend?

 

 

Cheers

[CyberNerd]

That is quite a lot. We have 25+ cameras, keep footage for 3 weeks and use about 2TB.

 

Are your cameras continuously recording ? It might be worth reducing the framerate and set them to record on motion if you want to save a few quid.

[synaesthesia]

You will always get better mileage from dedicated NVRs - we looked up what we could do building a server and speccing our own cameras, then we found we could easily bust price and performance getting the dedicated NVRS - we're looking at the Hikvision kits. On anything standalone, you need an ABSOLUTE MONSTER of a processor. Sorry, but an i5 will only just cut it. It might be BlueIris on our part but our existing internal setup is running on an overclocked i5 2500k and 10 cameras is bouncing it off the 100% cpu usage mark.

[CyberNerd]

^ we found buying better cameras was the best compromise. A decent Axis camera will do the image processing on the device (motion detect), and encode it with h.264. It saves a huge amount of disk space and means you can get away with a cheap server (we have a centos box with 4GB RAM) and means NAS is now an option because the bandwidth is lower.

[Geoff]

It's important to buy cameras with onboard encoding hardware, otherwise yes, you will murder your CPU.

 

Supermicro do some nice chassis for high density storage.

 

Supermicro | Products | Chassis |4U | SC846BE1C-R1K28B

[Sephiroth]

We're currently looking at Mobotix cameras and have bought 4 as a test. They do all the processing onboard and save to either a NAS or an SD card. We're looking at a setup where they store on the card during the day then push that up to a NAS in the evening when no-one is here to complain about bandwidth.

 

I know other manufacturers do similar things but I would also seriously consider looking at hemispheric lenses. We can cover our entire site (large secondary; ~2000 on roll) with about 30 cameras in this manner.

[IanT]

I've just deployed a CCTV Server to one of are schools with the following array:

 

http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/products/disk-enclosures/product-detail.html?oid=6293995

[lmgtfy]

I've just deployed a CCTV Server to one of are schools with the following array:

 

http://www8.hp.com/uk/en/products/disk-enclosures/product-detail.html?oid=6293995

 

Thanks, can you let me know roughly what kind of prices we are talking about and where you got yours from if you wouldn't mind?

 

Cheers

[jbunoomally]

We have also been looking at are looking at :

Broadberry: 2U IP Video Surveillance Server & Storage Appliance

with Toshiba Enterprise Surveillance Drives - Tuned for Surveillance Applications - 90% write, 10% read perhaps mixed with some tiered SSD drives in the mix too.

 

JB.

[localzuk]

I'm not sure why the concept of using a NAS is being discounted entirely - they vary massively! Obviously a little desktop NAS isn't going to be able to do the job, but something like this is a very different beast - https://www.qnap.com/i/uk/product/model.php?II=112 . It has a Quad core Xeon processor in, for example.

[Chris_Cook]

We use milestone, and automatically archive footage after a day. We have about 200Gb storage for live data, when it runs out, it goes onto a nas box automatically.

 

We keep footage for 21 days, and make sure everyone knows if you want a copy of the footage you need to let us know within a week.

 

With regards to quality, its important to keep framerate and resolution high enough that you can use the footage. Otherwise it becomes an expensive yet pointless exercise.

[dhicks]

We are looking at implementing a new CCTV server with around 80-100 cameras and to keep footage for around 30 days. According to my calculations we would need around 30TB of storage after raid to do this at the frame rates and quality of the cameras.

 

If it's any help, we're using Ubiquiti's Unifi Video as a central server and around a dozen of their PoE Unifi cameras. The software was free, the cameras were around £100 each (we already had PoE capable switches, and had planned ahead and put network points where we needed them ready for CCTV cameras, so installation was easy - you might have some more network cabling to install). Their software is running on a small Linux VM (1 virtual processor, 4GB of RAM) and is currently showing using about 10% of processor time - as discussed above, the cameras themselves encode to h.264 (720p resolution), reducing workload on the server. For storage, a dozen cameras seems to be using around 0.5TB of storage per week - times by 10 to get your number of cameras is 5TB, times by 5 for 5 weeks, and I'd say your estimate of 30TB is about right.

 

We're using a QNAP NAS device for the actual storage, connected to the Linux VM running Ubiquiti's software via iSCSI. This was simply to use up an available device rather than by choice - a server with local storage makes sense. I'd go for RAID 6, though - larger disks have greater chance of failing when doing an array reconstruction. We're using 2TB WD Caviar Green drives, which so far have proven to be reliable and to have decent performance. Your main performance metric is probably going ot be the write capability of your RAID array - no amount of cache is really going to improve that, you'll be writing a fair bit of data to the array every hour, you simply need enough / fast enough disks to keep up. We've found the Caviar Greens to be okay for a dozen cameras, admittedly you might need to check the write performance before you scale that up by an order of magnitude.

[lmgtfy]

I'm not sure why the concept of using a NAS is being discounted entirely - they vary massively! Obviously a little desktop NAS isn't going to be able to do the job, but something like this is a very different beast - https://www.qnap.com/i/uk/product/model.php?II=112 . It has a Quad core Xeon processor in, for example.

 

I'd much prefer to use our existing NAS Qnap TS1079 Pro but I guess the main problem will be network traffic swamping the NAS and making it not work well for our backups which it is currently being used for.

[localzuk]

Yeah, you don't want to use something like that for more than 1 purpose. Dedicated storage for CCTV definitely.

[IanT]

Thanks, can you let me know roughly what kind of prices we are talking about and where you got yours from if you wouldn't mind?

 

Cheers

 

This is the one we got:

 

HP D3600 w/12 4TB 6G SAS 7.2K LFF(3.5in) Midline Smart Carrier HDD 48TB Bundle (Part Number: B7E38A)

 

Connected to a DL380 G9 Server, we had to purchase a Smart Array:

 

Smart Array P441

 

I think we got all this from misco and paid in total about 7-8k, I would have to check.

[dhicks]

We've found the Caviar Greens to be okay for a dozen cameras, admittedly you might need to check the write performance before you scale that up by an order of magnitude.

 

Just checked - our QNAP server (an 8-drive TS-809U model, at least 3 years old, around £1,000 when new without disks) is receiving between 2 MB/s and 4 MB/s of data. Easily handled by an array of 8 2TB WD20EARS:

 

Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Review (WD20EARS) | StorageReview.com - Storage Reviews

[CyberNerd]

I'd much prefer to use our existing NAS Qnap TS1079 Pro but I guess the main problem will be network traffic swamping the NAS and making it not work well for our backups which it is currently being used for.

 

Quite a few people have now mentioned that the cameras should be doing the compression not the software. If they are the network usage per camera is tiny.

It looks like you are having to spec a huge system because it is poorly designed, as the supplier mentioned;100 cameras being re-encoded on the fly probably won't work well on NAS. Get better cameras and this won't be an issue.

[dhicks]

100 cameras being re-encoded on the fly probably won't work well on NAS. Get better cameras and this won't be an issue.

 

It could, of course, be that the original poster has an existing set of installed cameras they want to carry on using. 100 cameras is at least £10,000 worth of hardware, probably more, plus installation cost - it would probably take someone the whole summer to replace that lot, and if you're replacing existing analouge CCTV cabling with network cabling you might need a certified engineer to work on the networking. I can see how spending £5,000 on a beefy server might be a cheaper option, and maybe upgrade to IP cameras section by section in the future.

[CyberNerd]

Indeed, I was just reading it like it was a new system.

[ITGURU]

We had a Hikvision 3mp system installed last year. All fixed cameras are POE fed from an NVR with HDD inside. NVR can take 8 or 16 cameras and we have 8 of these in various locations as we are a large site.

Software on the client then connects to all the NVRs so can view all feeds at once, so the only time network bandwidth is used, is when viewing with the client.

[lmgtfy]

@dhicks you've hit the nail on the head, I should have mentioned we are keeping around 20 analogue cameras. Thanks for all your suggestions guys I think I know where we are going with this now. Found a supplier that will do a Dell R510 server

Dual X5675 3.06 Six Core CPU, 32GB Ram,12 x 4TB SATA HDD, H700 Raid Controller with a 5Yrs NBD Warranty for about £3k so we are going to go with that.

 

Cheers as always

[CyberNerd]

I should have mentioned we are keeping around 20 analogue cameras.

 

Yes Sorry I was making assumptions.

When we did our we also kept analogue cameras and found these were the best bet to cut down on space/traffic end do the encoding:

AXIS M7016 Video Encoder | Axis Communications

[nathan]

We had a Hikvision 3mp system installed last year. All fixed cameras are POE fed from an NVR with HDD inside. NVR can take 8 or 16 cameras and we have 8 of these in various locations as we are a large site.

Software on the client then connects to all the NVRs so can view all feeds at once, so the only time network bandwidth is used, is when viewing with the client.

 

 

I'm using a couple of hikvision cameras at home (the 3mp model, non ptz). I think they are really good and love being able to zoom into the live feed on the mobile handsets.

 

EDIT: I should point out i'm using milestone xprotect

[ITGURU]

Same at home, although I use the free PCNVR software - whilst it's not the best software and no functionality to rewind playback footage it's convenient for use on phones and other devices.

 

Guess your using the free version?

 

I'm using a couple of hikvision cameras at home (the 3mp model, non ptz). I think they are really good and love being able to zoom into the live feed on the mobile handsets.

 

EDIT: I should point out i'm using milestone xprotect