The Right NAS For A 14 Camera MP Project?

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Brian Selltiz

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.)

John Honovich

IPVM | 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.

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Brian Selltiz

IPVMU Certified | In reply to John Honovich | 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.

John Honovich

IPVM | In reply to Brian Selltiz | 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

Steve Sabatino

In reply to John Honovich | 01/10/13 02:18am
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.
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Brian Selltiz

IPVMU Certified | In reply to Steve Sabatino | 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.

Steve Sabatino

In reply to Brian Selltiz | 01/10/13 02:39am
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*
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Brian Chetelat

In reply to Steve Sabatino | 01/11/13 02:58am
Guys if I may; I've been using several different NAS devices over the last few years and this site (http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/view) 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

John Honovich

IPVM | In reply to Brian Chetelat | 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?

Francesc Tortras

In reply to John Honovich | 01/16/13 09:07am
Hello, Is this solution suitable for a 300 cameras installation in a building? Thank you
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Brian Selltiz

IPVMU Certified | In reply to Francesc Tortras | 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.

Francesc Tortras

In reply to Brian Selltiz | 01/16/13 05:21pm
Yes Brian, I know that, but I was thinking on the hardware solution. Are IOMEGA px4-300d or Netgear suitable for this size of installation? IOMEGA has a very low cost for 12TB capacity.

John Honovich

IPVM | In reply to Francesc Tortras | 01/16/13 05:39pm

Iomega NASes appear to top out at 36TB (see product lineup) which would be quite constraining for a 300 camera project. You would likely need numerous boxes with this approach. If all the cameras are being recorded in the same place, you might be better off looking for hardware that supports more drive bays in a given unit.

Francesc Tortras

In reply to John Honovich | 01/17/13 05:21pm

Hi John,

More or less for 300 cameras, each one at 1Mbps (H.264) and continous recording for 15 days, it takes around 53TB. So it will be necessary 2 Iomega NAS.

So, this will work? which software will manage acces to video in this boxes?

John Honovich

IPVM | In reply to Francesc Tortras | 01/17/13 05:24pm

For 300 cameras, you likely need a VMS anyway. Outside of using Bosch or Mobotix, there are not many VMS serverless offerings for that many cameras.

Francesc Tortras

01/17/13 06:10pm

OK. Thank you John

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