Design Question

[sajones]

Hello,

I am looking to implement a solution using 50 cameras. My plan is to record at 10fps at a reduced resolution (480p?). I plan to use 3 beefy NVRs running Vitamin D to manage roughly 17 cameras each. This will exist on a production network. The videos will be saved to a network attached storage device. This is a gigabit network. My question is: What will the impact be on network bandwidth both for cameras and for saving videos to the NAS? How do I calculate it? I want to be sure that I don't bog down the network with the video streams causing the production data system to be sluggish. Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to segment the cameras and NVRs from the NAS, so traffic will be on the production network.

Thanks,
Scott

[ryan]

17 cameras should be possible on a sufficiently built dedicated machine. The limiting factor in this scenario (which might surprise you) is likely to be disk access. The users I've heard of doing large scale setups like this have been using various raid setups to help facilitate sufficient access speeds. This would also apply to your NAS all the machines were pushing to the same networked server. However, if only clips matching certain rules are being pushed to the network storage for backup (such as via the ftp rule) the speed of the network storage will be much less of an issue.

As far as bandwidth goes, I really can't tell you. Cameras vary wildly in the amount of data they push, and the same model can vary based on fps, quality, and other settings. Your best bet for this would be to set up some experiments, assuming you have the model of camera you would be using in your possession. Stream from it via the settings and url you would expect to be using in your setup and monitor the bandwidth used on the machine you are streaming to (there are a number of utilities to watch network input/output on a machine. You can then extrapolate what the total usage would be. There are numerous other factors to this calculation though, with regard to what network equipment you are using and it's relative efficiency.

Hope that helps,
- ryan

[falcon999]

please post the specs of the machine you get to process 17 cameras i have 16 and I wonder how much i need to upgrade to process all of them.