Need a little help with building IP camera server

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

Richard Wad

Member
Feb 7, 2017
39
8
8
48
I'm looking at this:
Supermicro | Products | SuperStorage Servers | 4U | 5049P-E1CTR36L
For an IP camera recording server with 100 720p-1080p cameras. Will populate with 36 12TB drives, 4x16GB memory, Windows 2016 server. Have not decided on which drive or processor yet but I was leaning towards WD Golds and at least an octo Xeon Silver.

Looking at dividing up the drives into multiple Raid 6 arrays. Biggest concern is making sure the SAS controller, drives, CPU and most importantly the network can handle the bandwidth of over 100 IP camera streams. I need the most help with this part of it.

Cameras should all be giga links. 100 Cameras at average to good quality compression, 15 FPS, bandwidth becomes a concern as it exceeds the max of gigabit ethernet. Fortunately the server has 10 GB nics, but that means I need a 10 GB switch, or an uplink into where the PoE cameras feed into. Would it be more feasible to install a quad NIC with one run to a cheaper 1000 mbps PoE Switch, instead of trying to get a 10GB link in?
 

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
1,708
515
113
Canada
You are really too vague here to run the numbers. That said, if you used 10Mbit cameras, you could easily push 100 of them down a couple 1Gbps links. and would need around 13TB of storage to capture them for 24hrs. Anything less than that kind of resolution and you could shove them all down the one 1Gbps link I think. I doubt that there's a need to go to 10Gbps unless you are putting a pair of eyeballs on the end of the wires :D
 

maze

Active Member
Apr 27, 2013
576
100
43
Regarding networking.. this all depends on how much data does each stream provide? 1080p can be from still images to like 60fps (the latter being quite bandwidth intensive).

I really doubt what you are doing will be a success.. your spindels will be hit hard, continously.. 24/7. I would rather do some big ssd's to do the incoming data and then move to archive in chunks. But thats just my thought about it.