Cloud solution help?

[ClarityAVS]

Our company has several locations, most of which we have installed Hivision NVR's along with Hikvision cameras. We max out the amount of disk space in each said NVR's but now we are being told we may have to keep footage indefinitely (right now it's 3 months, but I believe new policies we must require a year or more).

By calculations of current settings most locations would need about 170Tb of disk space with one location needing double that as we have over 120 cameras on that NVR. Is there a cloud based solution I can look into that will work along side our current system?
If so, what does the upload on our WAN look like while using that? I don't want to max out our WAN 24/7.

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

I'd be interested what kind of industry you are in that says you need to keep footage indefinitely? I would advise them that its simply not an option

 

[SouthernYankee]

can you set it up to use high resolution recordings for 1 week . Do a long term recording using the second substream low resolution. Not sure if the NVR can do this.
That much cloud storage is a high network load and a massive amount of storage.

 

[mat200]

Our company has several locations, most of which we have installed Hivision NVR's along with Hikvision cameras. We max out the amount of disk space in each said NVR's but now we are being told we may have to keep footage indefinitely (right now it's 3 months, but I believe new policies we must require a year or more).

By calculations of current settings most locations would need about 170Tb of disk space with one location needing double that as we have over 120 cameras on that NVR. Is there a cloud based solution I can look into that will work along side our current system?
If so, what does the upload on our WAN look like while using that? I don't want to max out our WAN 24/7.

Hi @ClarityAVS

Would be interesting to see how your numbers stack up / add up.

I can see doing a lot of work to spec the system out, and walking into the CFO's office and presenting the numbers .. and to magically see that requirement of excessive storage dropped once they see the potential bill.

In terms of enterprise cloud storage.. I'm certain there must be something. I am very curious to see what is proposed.

 

[k110]

Cloud storage is cheap, take for example Azure blob storage, in the 'cool' pricing tier, 200TB will cost you 1688€ per month, for us that's a lot of money but for a big company like this? Or you can choose archive storage on Azure, 200TB will cost you 304€ per month. Downside is that you pay extra when you want to download those files again because in the background it is saved to tape and some manual work is required + it could take hours or days to retrieve that data, but that's why it's 'archive' storage.

Problem will be WAN bandwidth, if every camera produces 1mbps, for that one site that's 120mbps constant upload!

 

[bp2008]

By calculations of current settings most locations would need about 170Tb of disk space with one location needing double that as we have over 120 cameras on that NVR. Is there a cloud based solution I can look into that will work along side our current system?
If so, what does the upload on our WAN look like while using that? I don't want to max out our WAN 24/7.

If you can calculate storage requirements, then you already know the bit rate you will be recording at. That same bit rate would be required on the upload of your internet connection.

170 TB / 1 year = 5.38708999 MB/s or 43.09671992 Mbps.

 

[sebastiantombs]

Besides the sheer volume of data to be stored, I see a problem with "permanent" storage. How long is permanent? Tape systems have evolved and permanent tapes don't actually exist. They all degrade with time. The same is true of CDs, although they can last much longer. If using physical disks there's the disk failure problems although redundant RAID systems can mitigate that but that involves constantly replacing drives in a system that grows by leaps and bounds on a daily basis. Cloud storage is an alternative, but expensive and relies on similar systems AKA constantly increasing costs Maybe government can afford that, after all we pay the bill for it, but even a company the size of Amazon might choke at trying to do something similar.

 

[ClarityAVS]

Thanks for the info guys. We have on site storage, i guess it's only one facility that needs the data

Cloud storage is cheap, take for example Azure blob storage, in the 'cool' pricing tier, 200TB will cost you 1688€ per month, for us that's a lot of money but for a big company like this? Or you can choose archive storage on Azure, 200TB will cost you 304€ per month. Downside is that you pay extra when you want to download those files again because in the background it is saved to tape and some manual work is required + it could take hours or days to retrieve that data, but that's why it's 'archive' storage.

Problem will be WAN bandwidth, if every camera produces 1mbps, for that one site that's 120mbps constant upload!

We actually have a ton of Azure storage available through our contracts with MS. So perhaps this is the route to go. Is there a way to back up Hikvision NVR's to Azure easily? Or will this consist of backing up to local storage on a NAS or SAN and then sending out to Azure?
I'm trying the Remote Backup software from Hikvision and thus far it's just been terribly slow to even initialize one camera let alone 50-100.

 

[ClarityAVS]

Also, this is the NVR model I'm dealing with: DS-96128NI-I24 / H

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

If you can calculate storage requirements, then you already know the bit rate you will be recording at. That same bit rate would be required on the upload of your internet connection.

170 TB / 1 year = 5.38708999 MB/s or 43.09671992 Mbps.

Its a little more complicated than that, that assumes minimal to no latency, and no packet loss. Both will be a factor going over any WAN connection

Maybe if you had Azure ExpressRoute you would see closer to that, but just going over the plain old internet, I'd cut that figure down a lot

 

[ClarityAVS]

we have two WAN connections, one of which is 1/1Gbps. So i'd be able to route through that and not cause any issues with production. I guess now the hardest thing is getting data off the NVR to throw into Azure. This Remote Backup software from Hikvision is garbage.

 

[k110]

I guess now the hardest thing is getting data off the NVR to throw into Azure.

Indeed, Azure blob storage does not support SMB or NFS protocol so you cannot mount it as a drive mapping for example, you need tools to connect to azure blob storage and I've not seen features for the NVR to connect directly to Azure blob storage. You could install a NAS next to the NVR and connect that NAS to Azure blob storage, for example Synology NAS can do native back-up to Azure blob storage.

 

[revilasn]

Indeed, Azure blob storage does not support SMB or NFS protocol so you cannot mount it as a drive mapping for example, you need tools to connect to azure blob storage and I've not seen features for the NVR to connect directly to Azure blob storage. You could install a NAS next to the NVR and connect that NAS to Azure blob storage, for example Synology NAS can do native back-up to Azure blob storage.

Apparently Azure supports SMB and NFS in Azure Storage (Azure Files tier). This documentation shows that NFS protocols 2.1 and 3.0 are well supported, and NFS 4.1 is in beta (public preview) since the start of 2021.

But when I try to connect a Hikvision camera to my Azure Storage NFS/SMB endpoints, I receive this error message: "Wrong Server Address" (attached image).

1. Do you know which SMB/NFS versions does Hikvision support?
2. Have you ever seen this "Wrong Server Address" message?

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

$20 says the Hikvision camera is trying SMBv1

I think "wrong server address" is some generic error message for "It doesn't work", how do they know its wrong? It should tell you the connection timed out, could not resolve DNS, etc etc

 

[SpacemanSpiff]

...
You could install a NAS next to the NVR and connect that NAS to Azure blob storage, for example Synology NAS can do native back-up to Azure blob storage.

Relying on off-site storage is only good until you lose Internet connectivity. On-site appliance might be a good consideration. These NVR's recording 24/7?