Hardware Advice new Camera server

[Hetcamsys]

Hey Guys,

Our current Blue Iris server isn't powerful enough to run all our camera's.
(dual xeon e5-2620 at 2.0ghz with 128gb ram) this is rather old and not sufficient.

Our situation:

We have 45 IP camera's running below full HD resolutions and at 15 FPS, we only record motion at the moment, saving the footage to our NAS.

But blue iris is crashing and the cpu is spiking at 100% when accessing footage from the web interface.
(we are on the latest update)

Is there hardware on the market that can run this setup?

Please tell me if more information is needed.

Thanks in advance!

 

[bp2008]

Hello.

You would be better off with an i7 with quick sync video so you could use hardware acceleration (assuming your cameras are all streaming H.264). Less power consumption that way at the very least, though I can't promise it would handle the camera load any better as that sounds like a pretty significant load. I've read of people trying bigger camera loads than that on more powerful servers, and running into performance-limiting bottlenecks before the CPU even hit 50%. I've witnessed an i7-6700 system choking on less than you are running (assuming an average of 1 megapixel per camera, your system is about 675 megapixels per second).

I encourage you to read this in case you are missing any crucial optimizations: Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage | IP Cam Talk

Whether you buy new hardware or not, you should try hard to keep CPU usage below 80-90% so that your video streams are not adversely affected. This will probably mean reducing camera frame rates (in each camera's web interface).

 

[DWW0311]

Hey Guys,

Our current Blue Iris server isn't powerful enough to run all our camera's.
(dual xeon e5-2620 at 2.0ghz with 128gb ram) this is rather old and not sufficient.

Our situation:

We have 45 IP camera's running below full HD resolutions and at 15 FPS, we only record motion at the moment, saving the footage to our NAS.

But blue iris is crashing and the cpu is spiking at 100% when accessing footage from the web interface.
(we are on the latest update)

Is there hardware on the market that can run this setup?

Please tell me if more information is needed.

Thanks in advance!

I'm assuming that this box is rack mounted and you'll want to replace it with another rack mount.

1) How many rack U's can you allocate to the box, and;

2) what's your proposed budget max?

 

[Hetcamsys]

Hello.

You would be better off with an i7 with quick sync video so you could use hardware acceleration (assuming your cameras are all streaming H.264). Less power consumption that way at the very least, though I can't promise it would handle the camera load any better as that sounds like a pretty significant load. I've read of people trying bigger camera loads than that on more powerful servers, and running into performance-limiting bottlenecks before the CPU even hit 50%. I've witnessed an i7-6700 system choking on less than you are running (assuming an average of 1 megapixel per camera, your system is about 675 megapixels per second).

I encourage you to read this in case you are missing any crucial optimizations: Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage | IP Cam Talk

Whether you buy new hardware or not, you should try hard to keep CPU usage below 80-90% so that your video streams are not adversely affected. This will probably mean reducing camera frame rates (in each camera's web interface).

Thanks for your answer, we did all the things we could in the optimizing blue iris page, we got it to run at about 50% when the cams are not recording much motion but then the server still crashes if you want to watch back clips on the web interface.

I'm assuming that this box is rack mounted and you'll want to replace it with another rack mount.

1) How many rack U's can you allocate to the box, and;

2) what's your proposed budget max?

Also thank you for your answer.

We are using a rack server right now because it is what we had spare from another project but we dont mind it being just a regular tower if that saves cost.

We dont have a budget yet, but we are looking for maybe 3 options in diffrent price brackets so we can choose what we want and present that. but i dont think we can do anything above 1200usd

 

[DWW0311]

We are using a rack server right now because it is what we had spare from another project but we dont mind it being just a regular tower if that saves cost.

We dont have a budget yet, but we are looking for maybe 3 options in diffrent price brackets so we can choose what we want and present that. but i dont think we can do anything above 1200usd

To be frank, that budget is going to preclude anything new & rack mounted I had in mind to suggest. Passmark on your existing CPUs is 7971. E3's aren't going to buy you much in that regard since they are all UP and even the v6's are posting Passmarks in the 11,000 range. IMO you'll need a stout E5 2P/4P setup. Consider something like a Thinkstation D30 with 2 E5-1600 v2 / E5-2600 v2's.

Like this one:

Amazon.com: Lenovo ThinkStation D30 Workstation, 2x Intel Xeon E5-2660 2.2GHz Eight Core CPU's, 128GB memory, 2TB hard drive, NVIDIA Quadro 600, Windows 7 Professional Installed: Computers & Accessories

That would be a significant bump in horsepower, but I agree with BP above - I would explore tuning performance on the existing box first. Worst case it doesn't work and you're no worse off than you already are.