Subscriber Discussion
The Right NAS For A 14 Camera MP Project?
IPVMU Certified | 01/06/13 06:06am
Before I started researching my options I figured I would see what the group's recommendations are. I have 14 cameras going in with Axis Camera Companion (by customer insistence). I know I need to consider capacity & throughput, the camera counts are 7 1MP and 7 3MP. Thanks all. (And please, if you are a rep or a manufacturer, don't try selling me something, only respond if a member gives incorrect info on your product - thx.)
IPVM
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01/09/13 09:35pm
Brian, Axis responded with some useful feedback. Let me recap: On the AXIS Camera Companion compatibility page we have listed 3 different NAS drives that are used as reference products.
They are:
Axis noted that "These three models have been extensively tested with 16 cameras recording frequent motion detection with 720p resolution at 30fps. They also passed the test with simultaneous read/write (playback/recording)." Interestingly, all the models listed are higher end SMB / professional units, NOT the entry level consumer ones. They are not a huge difference in price but more in the $400 rather than $200 range. Axis also had these recommendations: * Make sure the NAS is updated to the latest available firmware * Use hard drives recommended by the NAS manufacturer * Split up the cameras between the hard drives to decrease the load on each drive * Set up quotas for each camera on the NAS to make sure every single camera has its dedicated space on the hard drive I though the splitting up cameras between hard drives was interesting. It requires some more configuration and I am not sure how much benefit it will provide but something to think about.
IPVMU Certified | | 01/09/13 11:36pm
Good information, thanks for following up John. We already split up cameras across different hard drives manually on our Milestone deployments so that makes sense to us. I guess I will try out the Netgear model and see how it goes. I had an open support ticket with Axis on a related matter so I decided to ask them just how much one of the recommended NAS devices could handle. I asked: "Can any of the recommended NAS devices handle a qty of 16 1347 5MP Cameras running at 30fps in a busy scene environment with compression set to 30?" Their response was very similar to yours (probably answered by the same tech\engineer) but did include one more item: "As a general rule we suggest to use a NAS with the following minimum specifications: CPU – Intel® Atom 1.6GHz RAM – 512MB DDR2/DDR3 Moving up in resolution will increase the load on the NAS, but the total load according to the described settings should still be within the scope of our tests." I will try to update this post after I have some results from our deployment. Thanks again.
IPVM
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| 01/10/13 01:30am
Brian, good feedback. Axis did mention the general rule but I forgot to include. Thanks for adding that in. I am curious about the 512MB RAM / Atom 1.6 recommendation. That seems pretty low even for a NAS. By contrast, the iomega unit they recommend is much 'beefier' with a dual core 1.8Ghz with 2GB of RAM - http://go.iomega.com/en-us/products/network-storage-rack/px4-px6/px4-300d-sc/#tech_specsItem_tab
I didn't look at any of the units but do these NAS boxes not have a RAID controller or are you just not using the RAID? I find it interesting that you have to split the camera recording up among various drives. I see why if you just have 4x2TB drives and you pull in 4x2TB drives into windows but anything different and the OS/drive controller are going to handle that anyways.
IPVMU Certified | | 01/10/13 02:27am
Hi Jason, in this scenario we are choosing not to use RAID, the boxes do have that option. I think you will get better throughput using JBOD in regard to reading data. I think I remember reading that RAID 0 can increase seek times, or maybe it was latency, either of which are important in playback. JBOD will also give you a layer of redundancy over RAID 0, if one drive fails you only lose those camera's footage.
That's what I figured. RAID 0 will help with latency but if you lose a disk you lose everything in that RAID 0 set. RAID 1 is good for improving read times. Not being picky or anything :) but there is no redundancy really, just less loss of data if you map your cameras to different drives and one fails. RAID 5 or RAID 1 would give you redundancy but I would hate to see the rebuild times on those NAS boxes if a drive fails *shuddders*
Guys if I may; I've been using several different NAS devices over the last few years and this site (NAS Charts - File Copy Write Performance) does a pretty good job with testing different (but not all) brands. It lets you choose the different Read/Write RAID levels and view the results of each. Cheers, Brian
IPVM
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| 01/11/13 03:09am
Brian, thanks! According to this site, essentially every NAS on the list supports at least 15 MB/s write throughput both in pure file copy and in RAID5 Since that's 120Mb/s, that would handle quite a lot of cameras - 20 or more even full frame megapixel ones. Has it been your experience than that any on this list handles a lot of cameras successfully? Or am I reading this wrong?
Hello, Is this solution suitable for a 300 cameras installation in a building? Thank you
IPVMU Certified | | 01/16/13 02:13pm
Hi Francesc, Axis Camera companion is limited to 16 cameras. For an installation that size I would recommend Milestone (Enterprise or Corporate versions), Avigilon or Genetec. There are many other VMS solutions out there as well. Best of luck.
OK. Thank you John
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