Will This VMS Work With IT Provided SAN?

Hi All;

The fact - more and more IT Companies are involved in Security systems. They are coming in as an adviser, or lately, again more and more as SI’s, trying to get direct contacts with manufacturers to get direct deals with the investors.

Beside that, they force their own Hardware – Server and Storage. A lot of time the investor/end-user has brand-named equipment for the whole IT equipment, with maintenance contracts, service contracts… And some parts of the Server/storage equipment are already in place at the investor – working 24/7 – two-side trust already gained…

In one situation we came to a project with 150 cameras where the IT Integrator got the main contract -- forcing their own HW. We are not concerned about the Server selection but on the Storage side we are a little bit suspicious. They want to use an iSCSI Storage.

I do not know the vendor of the storage – but here some of the tech data:

Connection : SAN

RAID type : RAID5

Member disk : 6+2

Disk type : SAS

Disk size : 3.5inch

Disk capacity : 2-4TB

Disk speed : 7,200rpm

Access type : Sequential

Block size : 128 KB

Host I/F : iSCSI 1G

Performance of 1RAID : 220 MB/s

Performance of estimated configuration with 2 controllers: 464 MB/s ( 2 MB/s / TB )

Number of Disk : 72 disks, 192,26 TB

The IP Video System itself – server/client:

150pcs of H.264 cameras with 6Mbit/sec maximum each – fixed – makes 1200Mb/sec.

Divided on 3 Servers. Server with XEON inside, OS on SSD; Recording/Viewing divided through double NIC cards;

Each server connected with a 2x1Gb iSCSI (network) connection.

1 Remote Viewing Client – always connected - 4 Monitors FullHD (using Secondary stream) – showing max.40 cams with a secondary stream; some kind of "small" VideoWall;

1 Remote Client – always connected – 16cams on a FullHD monitor max., again, secondary stream.

1 Remote client – through a web client; occasionally.

So, nothing special on the viewing side;

The IT company swears on this – saying, that it will work 100%;

Maybe some smaller delays in getting the initial client-stream from the server. The investor is ok with this delay.

Maybe I miss something – let me please know if You have done something similar – every hint/idea is really welcome.

Thx in advance for any shared info!

We've been using iSCSI storage with 3xLOGIC Vigil DVRs for years now - depending on customer budget, it's generally been Enhance, QNAP, or Promise, but all of them connect the same way: create iSCSI LUN on the RAID, connect the DVR's iSCSI Initiator to it, and the LUN appears in Windows' Disk Management just like any other internal hard drive would.

Create a volume, format it, give it a drive letter, and Vigil uses it just as it would an internal drive. In most cases, all recording goes to the NAS, while the internal data drive(s) is/are configured as "Backup" drive(s), used only if the NAS goes offline.

One site has around 58 cameras (mix of analog and MP) on two Vigil 32-channel hybrid machines, each recording to its own LUN on a single Promise VessRAID; disk configuration is 16 x 3TB drives, RAID6+spare, for a total of about 40TB available, and 20TB allocated to each LUN. We've had no performance issues with this, and no search/playback delays that anyone has ever complained of (even if there were, it would be tricky to blame them on the NAS).