Hello friends
we r looking for storage solution with large retention period of 750+ cameras. the capacity may go upto about 1500tb pretty soon. later we may add more number of cameras. the options we are considering are as follows:
BCDVideo
EMC isilon
NetApp
EMC VNX5600 or 5800
can I get expert opinion.
Looks like you found a whale!. Given that amount of storage required, I would be looking at the NetApp solutions, which isn't low cost but depending on the model will have the throughput required to pull it off, and they are built more for the high availability, large scale solution you need. What VMS are you planning on putting on it? with that many cameras you may want to look into a system that does archiving so record to one set of drives then offload to a storage solution which if done right you can stagger the archiving periods to better utilize a NAS or SAN's throughput for longer term storage and lower cost drives.
Thanks buddy, still undecided on vms it may be onssi or genetec. will it make difference? I was told EMC is better option.
The EMC systems are right on par with a Netapp and I think between the two you shouldn't go terribly wrong. But now that you have listed the VMS choices, go with genetec, Onssi will just make your life miserable, I have an 800+ camera system running on Onssi and I curse it every day.
Mainly performance related issues, we were on the milestone backend which would constantly freeze up. We never had a successful upgrade... ever. We felt like making a change to the system or recording parameters was like playing Jenga, you weren't sure if the system was going to crash and burn, or actually make the change. Every time we ever called into tech support, they always answered "never heard of that happening before". We are at the point where we stopped selling Onssi unless we absolutely had to, and we are not leading new projects with it. And the whole change over process from Milestone to the new recording engine has just been a nightmare, having to basically set up the system from scratch... ok on a 700+ camera system that is a freaking weeks worth of labor resetting motion detection windows and camera names, then going back through each camera to check the settings, finding out you missed important events because your settings were too light... having to find that perfect balance X 700+ gets old very fast, especially since you just had to do it the last time the Onssi system crashed and burned from the last upgrade which somehow corrupted the SQL database beyond recognition.
System is configured properly, according to tech support, hardware and storage exceed what ONSSI presales engineers recommended and still the performance is horrible. So yeah we don't lead with Onssi, been burned way too many times.
Yeah we have some pretty sophisticated Onssi setups, and features like failover were not working, Onssi couldn't figure it out, now we record each camera on each system instead of failing over. Glad they were able to support you guys, and have a stable system, but I personally have lost too many Friday nights to rebuilding systems because Onssi has crashed.
You might also consider Seneca Data server/storage solutions as well.
Check out Spectra Logic for the lowest cost/highest quality.
John Convy
Ask questions and get answers to your physical security questions from IPVM team members and fellow subscribers.
