Mega Challenge 100 Cams in a warehouse.

[Ilker Yildiz]

Dear all,

Here are the minimum requirements from Security Authority;

300,000 sf2 warehouse,
min 720p resolution however 1080p or higher needed for valuable items, zooming needs.
Min 90 Day record retention, 120 days the recomended
IP cameras,
Remote Access options.

I will have access to IT budget , however I do not even know where to start from.

1) I truly do not want to mix and match the cameras, do you guys know a good quality budget camera brand? I heard great things about Hikvision but never had an experience with it.

2) System ; I was thinking about building one Dual E5-2699 v3 with 24 bay X 6TB Seagate Surveillance HDDs however I am little scared of putting all my eggs in one basket so I am now leaning towards building two single e5-2699 v3 (still dual Motherboard for future improvements and camera add ons) 12 x 6TB Seagate Surveillance HDDs in each system. Leaving 12 bays empty for future developments. Do you guys see any problems for either approach?

3) Instead of me building this machines, is there an NVR solution out there for this many cameras with 90 ~120 day storage?

4) I truly do not know what NVR software should I use? These will be windows based systems.

5) What kind of switches do you guys recommend? In warehouse (IT room) we normally use ProSafe switches for their lifetime warranty, however I am open to suggestions.

6) Anything I am missing, please let me know.

Sorry about my ignorance about NVR systems, we would like to keep this in house for some specific reasons, we started upgrading from analog to digital cabling next week waiting for the CAT6 cables. Any help with this truly appriciated

Reagrds
ilker

 

[corkangel76]

First off, I wouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket with that few of systems, I'd use a MINIMUM of 4 systems to handle 100 cameras... next, archive to a NAS for longer storage, or use the cloud if your bandwidth permits.

I would strongly recommend you use HP Procurve or Cisco switches for this big of a volume of traffic.... you want something enterprise grade... not cheap off the shelf at Best Buy switches.

Cat 5e or even Cat5 is fine, since your cameras won't most likely run more than 10/100... I would ask why you would need that much retention... if something happens its going to take you 90+ days to discover it?

 

[Ilker Yildiz]

This particular client requires 90+ days for retention, when asked simply brushed off by stating " Government Rules and Regulations" , surprising because every other government owned company required 30 days min.

 

[Ilker Yildiz]

Ok, Here is an update,

I have decided to go with 2 identical systems and create redundancy also added an NAS for mirroring these 2 systems in case of raid card failures.

Computer Case I choose; NORCO RPC-4224 4U Rackmount Server Case with 24 Hot-Swappable SATA/SAS Drive Bays
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219038&cm_re=Norco_4224-_-11-219-038-_-Product

I like the case on paper; since building 2 of these , ordered 2.


Intel or AMD? That was the question took most of my time. Since I will be using a Recording software and handle 50 cams each , I decided to go with Max core count. in this arena Xeon E5-2699 v3 is the king with 18 cores however the cost is somewhere around 5 grand each, x4. No need to spend this kind of money. I will keep the money and build a NAS for the difference. I decided to go with the next thing I found AMD OPTERON 6376 on sale for 470$ in Microcenter with 16 cores.

http://www.microcenter.com/product/430516/Opteron_6300_Series_23_GHz_16_Core_Socket_G34_Boxed_Processor

Bought 4 of these babies, memories, ASUS server boards and 2 SSDs for installing an operating system. All together less than a cost of single e5-2699 V3 CPU. This allowed me to spend money on NAS. 32cores and 64 threads should be able to handle 50 cams without breaking a sweat.

Raid Card; Since i will be using a raid , i decided o go with following raid card mathces the Norco case i ordered. HighPoint RocketRAID 2760A . I know there are boat loads of cards out there LSI is being one of them but I had HighPoints cards before and never had an issue so my loyalty won in this section.

HDD; Purple not not to Purple. Here I am going with Seagate Surveillance HDD 6TB each. that id 48 X 6TB HDD. I am still contemplating the purchase. I believe i will go purchase 12 X 6TB and see how much space is actually used then scale up to actual number. Please keep in mind Video needs to remain on the disk for 90+ days. Aiming for 91 days max.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178641&cm_re=seagate_surveillance-_-22-178-641-_-Product


SOFTWARE ; this is my biggest problem, What software should I use? Any suggestions? How can I connect 2 systems under one command center? I needs to do more homework.

SWITCHES and DIAGRAM; Did not even start doing this yet. Open to suggestions.

To be Continued.

 

[fenderman]

Ok, Here is an update,

I have decided to go with 2 identical systems and create redundancy also added an NAS for mirroring these 2 systems in case of raid card failures.

Computer Case I choose; NORCO RPC-4224 4U Rackmount Server Case with 24 Hot-Swappable SATA/SAS Drive Bays
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219038&cm_re=Norco_4224-_-11-219-038-_-Product

I like the case on paper; since building 2 of these , ordered 2.


Intel or AMD? That was the question took most of my time. Since I will be using a Recording software and handle 50 cams each , I decided to go with Max core count. in this arena Xeon E5-2699 v3 is the king with 18 cores however the cost is somewhere around 5 grand each, x4. No need to spend this kind of money. I will keep the money and build a NAS for the difference. I decided to go with the next thing I found AMD OPTERON 6376 on sale for 470$ in Microcenter with 16 cores.

http://www.microcenter.com/product/430516/Opteron_6300_Series_23_GHz_16_Core_Socket_G34_Boxed_Processor

Bought 4 of these babies, memories, ASUS server boards and 2 SSDs for installing an operating system. All together less than a cost of single e5-2699 V3 CPU. This allowed me to spend money on NAS. 32cores and 64 threads should be able to handle 50 cams without breaking a sweat.

Raid Card; Since i will be using a raid , i decided o go with following raid card mathces the Norco case i ordered. HighPoint RocketRAID 2760A . I know there are boat loads of cards out there LSI is being one of them but I had HighPoints cards before and never had an issue so my loyalty won in this section.

HDD; Purple not not to Purple. Here I am going with Seagate Surveillance HDD 6TB each. that id 48 X 6TB HDD. I am still contemplating the purchase. I believe i will go purchase 12 X 6TB and see how much space is actually used then scale up to actual number. Please keep in mind Video needs to remain on the disk for 90+ days. Aiming for 91 days max.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178641&cm_re=seagate_surveillance-_-22-178-641-_-Product


SOFTWARE ; this is my biggest problem, What software should I use? Any suggestions? How can I connect 2 systems under one command center? I needs to do more homework.

SWITCHES and DIAGRAM; Did not even start doing this yet. Open to suggestions.

To be Continued.

AMD is a poor choice for any pc NVR...they are not as efficient as intel systems...Also, before purchasing the pc, first decide on the cameras and the software you will be using. You may be significantly overspending on the hardware.

 

[Ilker Yildiz]

I am thinking about getting Hikvision cameras the new ones I believe 2042 cameras. Only program I saw was the Blue Iris , quite frankly I do not know of any other programs. Do you have any suggestions on the program or the camera?

 

[fenderman]

I am thinking about getting Hikvision cameras the new ones I believe 2042 cameras. Only program I saw was the Blue Iris , quite frankly I do not know of any other programs. Do you have any suggestions on the program or the camera?

Go with the turret model not the bullet. The 4mp versions have great image quality.
Blue iris is a great program but not for your application.
Look at avigilon, exacq, milestone...you will have to pay a per camera license fee of around 100.

 

[Utkan]

Go with the turret model not the bullet. The 4mp versions have great image quality.
Blue iris is a great program but not for your application.
Look at avigilon, exacq, milestone...you will have to pay a per camera license fee of around 100.

fenderman, I was not able to find pricing details, to your knowledge which one of these are most cost effective on 100 cams level?

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Go with the turret model not the bullet. The 4mp versions have great image quality.
Blue iris is a great program but not for your application.
Look at avigilon, exacq, milestone...you will have to pay a per camera license fee of around 100.

fenderman, I was not able to find pricing details, to your knowledge which one of these are most cost effective on 100 cams level?

 

[fenderman]

fenderman, I was not able to find pricing details, to your knowledge which one of these are most cost effective on 100 cams level?

- - - Updated - - -




fenderman, I was not able to find pricing details, to your knowledge which one of these are most cost effective on 100 cams level?

They all will cost more or less the same. They all have different levels of the same software with different feature sets...its best to look at them all.
Member @ak357 is an avigilon dealer.

 

[bp2008]

AMD is a poor choice for any pc NVR...they are not as efficient as intel systems...Also, before purchasing the pc, first decide on the cameras and the software you will be using. You may be significantly overspending on the hardware.

Given that his CPU choice consumes more power and benchmarks slower than a 4 and a half year old intel chip, I think you are being diplomatic.

 

[fenderman]

Given that his CPU choice consumes more power and benchmarks slower than a 4 and a half year old intel chip, I think you are being diplomatic.

lol

 

[Ilker Yildiz]

lol

I still believe a that AMD is well capable of handling a simple task of NVR. When it comes down to non-encoding jobs such as NVR duties clock speed or benchmark numbers really does not matter, any current CPU is capable. All that matter in this case is that allocating a core ( or tread) to each camera with 1 GB of Ram, and 1TB of HDD space. Given the requirements of most demanding NVR programs, this setup is well capable of delivering NVR duties, Anything beyond this setup would have been an overkill that includes any XEON application. Nonetheless, this is where I am willing to put my money, with the savings of 15,000$ I would be able afford better cameras and NAS with it. Of course every setup is different.

 

[fenderman]

I still believe a that AMD is well capable of handling a simple task of NVR. When it comes down to non-encoding jobs such as NVR duties clock speed or benchmark numbers really does not matter, any current CPU is capable. All that matter in this case is that allocating a core ( or tread) to each camera with 1 GB of Ram, and 1TB of HDD space. Given the requirements of most demanding NVR programs, this setup is well capable of delivering NVR duties, Anything beyond this setup would have been an overkill that includes any XEON application. Nonetheless, this is where I am willing to put my money, with the savings of 15,000$ I would be able afford better cameras and NAS with it. Of course every setup is different.

Depending on the software you use you may be able to run your cams on a single i7 haswell machine. The amd cpu's you listed are weaker than an i7- haswell.. you can buy an entire machine from the dell outlet with an i7-4790 for the price you are paying for a single processor. The software you use is very important in determining which machines you buy...you are going about this in a backwards fashion. Find the software, then speak to the company to determine the cpu needs. you dont need 15k worth of hardware to run 100 cameras.

 

[Ilker Yildiz]

I am having hard time comprehending running 100 cams on an I7 single CPU , running 48HDDs. In my understanding i7 can be a client computer but it will never be able to replace the IT Room server for to run, store, archive and serve these files. I am new to this and learning as we go . So If I understood correctly with Milestone XProtect program on a single i7, I can run 48 HDDs with Raid environment , store , archive and share without the need of the second machine? Am I right?

 

[fenderman]

I am having hard time comprehending running 100 cams on an I7 single CPU , running 48HDDs. In my understanding i7 can be a client computer but it will never be able to replace the IT Room server for to run, store, archive and serve these files. I am new to this and learning as we go . So If I understood correctly with Milestone XProtect program on a single i7, I can run 48 HDDs with Raid environment , store , archive and share without the need of the second machine? Am I right?

You will likely need to spit it over two machines. Avigilon has servers that handle 128 cameras at once. You note 48 harddrives...are you going to record continuously or motion detection? Have you computed the disk space required? it may be much less than you think.
You need to research the software side before spending a dime on hardware.

 

[Ilker Yildiz]

We build and manage our own servers. 48 Drives will be divided into 2 machines for redundancy and run under RAID 6 for further redundancy. Although we are operating under 100Cams , this is only the 1/4th of the camera spots available. I had a chance to look at Avigilon Servers, there was a brief description however they use single e5 Xeon processor on Raid 5. MAX 2TB per HDD. We can go 64bit LBA to support 8TB HDD saving space and cost. Also running this many HDDs will require either a NAS or DAS. Additional cost to camera license pricing. Also no redundancy, if (1) Avigilon Server is down, everything is down. We are creating 2X (dual cpu) servers with DAS with the price of 1. This was the idea behind it. After deployment of this server we can use very low powered computers to manage and give access to our clients. Once again, I may be still missing the whole point. I have never done an NVR before but built/manage tons of servers. it is 48 HDDs but only 24 of these drives will be recording, other ones will be used as backup or hot swaps in case of a failure.

 

[fenderman]

We build and manage our own servers. 48 Drives will be divided into 2 machines for redundancy and run under RAID 6 for further redundancy. Although we are operating under 100Cams , this is only the 1/4th of the camera spots available. I had a chance to look at Avigilon Servers, there was a brief description however they use single e5 Xeon processor on Raid 5. MAX 2TB per HDD. We can go 64bit LBA to support 8TB HDD saving space and cost. Also running this many HDDs will require either a NAS or DAS. Additional cost to camera license pricing. Also no redundancy, if (1) Avigilon Server is down, everything is down. We are creating 2X (dual cpu) servers with DAS with the price of 1. This was the idea behind it. After deployment of this server we can use very low powered computers to manage and give access to our clients. Once again, I may be still missing the whole point. I have never done an NVR before but built/manage tons of servers. it is 48 HDDs but only 24 of these drives will be recording, other ones will be used as backup or hot swaps in case of a failure.

My point was that a depending on the software and other variables a single server can handle 128 cameras..you may choose to run two for redundancy...regardless before purchasing hardware decide on the software...then contact the maker for specs on the system you need. The drives may be overkill as well. It depends on the bitrate you will be recording at and whether or not you use motion detection or simply record 24/7...I would still never use amd. You can get a xeon with similar passmarks to the amd for about the same price.