GMaster1

....Did you actually want a serious answer to this?

When people use the words "Dell PowerEdge" to describe a dell server, I feel like they are describing the 2900 series and below which makes sense as to why you noted their cheap prices on eBay. Their newer models are downright amazing and consume less power than a modern desktop at times. For general audience reading this: If you do get an older PowerEdge for a file server or something, remember to buy a spare Perc controller. Most of them had capacitor issues. You're out of the country soon -- I'd at least leave a key hidden under a rock or something so that when your server/NVR/etc goes down, you have someone local to power cycle things if you don't want to invest in PDU appliances that reboot things when un-pingable and whatnot.

Wait let's start from the beginning. I think going an IP cam or DVR route is a bit overkill not to mention the amount of point of failures. If you want great image quality and something simple, get a ITB - 100HD SP and call it a day. Take it from me.. you want something simple in this situation. (I'm out a 50k dollar car thanks to an insurance scam accident last November...ugh) My SD card corrupted on the dash cam I had installed, so I now know to check that more frequently.

I have some pixels for you Dexter http://findlaydonnan.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/csi-the-e2809czoom-and-enhancee2809d-cliche-compilation-movie-montage.jpg

Right -- With CCTV or IT or whatever you do, why sell or work with something you're not confident with? Doesn't really depend on whether or not the product has support or the level of build quality, yada yada. That's up to you, the one providing the service. Some of my competitors love HP servers while I prefer Dell -- Simply because I'm comfortable with the hardware. I'm not going to quote out hardware beyond my abilities/knowledge because, at the end of the day, I'm the one that has the responsibility to drive my butt out at 3AM to fix stuff in very critical situations. Gotta go with what you're comfortable/confident with

This is all personal experience, but as someone who did professional photography as a side hobby, I used to have a pretty well defined list of reasons why the whole DSLR market never impacted my business. It all kinda boiled down to "If they want to pay 300USD for a full day of photography, let them. Not my business to try and convince them that I am worth several thousand dollars more and that they are making a possible mistake. That wastes time. Ironically, the pickier I got and more expensive I raised my prices (minimum $4,500/day) the more emails I received. Same with IT (and I'm assuming CCTV). I'm only 26 but found selling myself for over my competition made me more desirable to some. Now... you have to have the skills and sales experience to back it up and your stress levels intrinsically rise based on the liability and tasks you're sometimes given, but this whole "give in to the cheaper labor" will never fly with me. There's always a market for those who want quality. I guess at the very least just be confident in what you're selling/offering. Give them a solid reason to pay more and they will. --- Back to that wedding thing.. I attended a friend's wedding last year that had a $3k photog with a 5D and saw her work online a few days later. The image to the left is what she took for their dance. The image to the right is what I took using a 350D, 50 1.8, and bar napkin to diffuse light.

Haha I had my windows on a 335i smashed. Learned my lesson on a few other cars like it and eventually went with a modest Infiniti G37 (blends in with the crowd). Been wanting to get my hands on those ACTi domes for a little while now. Distributor is really taking his time getting back to me... ugh.

(And funny you mention it -- BMW is actually a great example of an average company putting some badges on something and calling it great when in reality much better performance/quality comes from brands far less expensive today. Unless you buy an M3 or find an M5 for a significant discount, it's all name brand experience. Their XDrive system was even a complete disaster up until two years ago... took them that long to figure out AWD.) (For you motorcycle enthusiasts, the same can be said about Harley Davidson. I used to do business with their engineering department in Milwaukee and was shocked to learn how intentional some of the rough edges and oil leaking is. "All part of the experience." they say..) I kind of wish Canon put more energy into IP camera technology... They can develop a dual core system capable of both shooting and instantly buffering 18MP @ 12fps with ISO up to 52,000 for a duration of over 100 photos.. I feel like they could resource a few men to create a decent 1080p cam for a better price.

I can understand the argument that more megapixels does not mean better camera. Obviously more features and abilities make up the split (For example, I have a $6k DSLR that takes about the same quality photos as a $600 camera.) I would argue, though, that the $600 camera should not be sold for $1,200 which is kind of like what I'm seeing with a number of manufacturers. Gets to be point where companies like Swann/Dahua/QSee become favorable in the professional industry much like what happened to Cisco some years back... They thought they could charge crazy premiums and complicate the hell out of their IOS. Admins then decided that for half the price they could do more if they sacrificed just a small percentage of what they needed in a switch/router aaaand goodbye Cisco demand. In the end I still think we're dealing with an industry that has serious growing pains. When almost 80% of the available companies/models to choose from STILL have gaping security holes and bugs in their firmware, you get the feeling that there just isn't enough R&D going into it.

Agreed. I made a rant about Axis a couple of weeks ago, citing their $1,100 box cameras that are still 640x480 and lack H.264 support...

The 1100-8p doesn't have a fan in it. At least mine doesn't. Good little switch for the price.

1.) To increase manual record time, go to program settings and click the "software" tab (I think?). There should be a check box you can un-check to remove a limit on manual recording times. 2.) You presumably have these cameras installed to capture activity on your lawn. I'd be curious to see results of someone walking by or anything close range. The only reason I mention this is because sometimes cameras will make themselves look attractive in low light conditions, but in order to do this they will reduce shutter speed to something below 1/30 second. This causes motion blur. I'm curious if the Foscam will do this to you or if both do. I would hope the ACTi would, by default, never let itself go below 1/30.

One network port, one power supply, one 3TB SATA, one year warranty for $800USD? I'd be skeptical of selling/recommending it to clients. The price alone is out of this world compared to what you can alternatively get with the same amount of money. Little is universally known about support, history, vulnerabilities, proprietary engineering, etc. (It's great that you want to test it out and discover those things, but being on the frontier sometimes means nowhere to turn when things get ugly--especially if you're entering a new market.) I have no idea what else is out there for entry level NVR systems though and whether or not they address these concerns. I built fully redundant enterprise 6 bay (15TB) NAS boxes for $445 (diskless) so perhaps my perception is skewed a bit. I would do some more searching if this NVR's software does not absolutely wow ya. Just my two cents

Also check out these if you're looking to install a camera that is either not PoE complaint or if you really don't want to buy a PoE switch: http://www.ebay.com/itm/160676759546?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1497.l2649 I have a handful of these things and they work wonders.

If you're only going to use the switch for cameras, I'd say there is no need to go gig. I have the ZyXel ES1100-8P running 4 Dahua PoE cameras and it works great. I chose that one over its cheaper (and sometimes more expensive) rivals because its power supply is built in to the unit. Has no issues delivering power to all 4 ports. Plus ZyXel has great support. I used to install their larger rack mount switches in data centers over Cisco/HP.

I had an issue with one of my bullets from Empire and after calling them the first time they offered to do an RMA after a quick over-the-phone troubleshooting session. I told them I'd fiddle with the camera some more and it turns out the issue was something mechanical on my end.

I looked into that DS1812+ as well but the price was almost the same as a traditional 2U NAS with redundant architecture. Then again I'm not sure why I need redundancy... until I think about my days managing walls of these: wireguy-- what drives did ya stack it with out of curiosity?

I think there are more factors that the Avigilon papers aren't telling here. SANs are almost always connected to a server. You could think of the iSCSI interface connecting the SAN to its server (called a "LUN") as a special "direct connection" which gives it that block level access. For that reason, you can't use a real SAN as a place to store things on a network by itself, so your idea of wanting to not use a PC would be an issue here. Also worthy to note that both SAN and NAS performance rely heavily on the following: 1.) Individual and combined disk speeds (measured in IOPS) 2.) RAID configuration 3.) Controller size 4.) Physical channel configuration (Teamed Ethernet, Fiber, etc) 5.) Frame size (Even a NAS can increase throughput using jumbo frames) As someone who inherently loves SANs and hates NAS boxes, I bought a little NAS box to test how it works with recording IP cams and was pretty impressed. Though, if I was to do any type of professional installation, I'd be really cautious on using them.. Almost every little NAS box is guilty of the following: 1.) Generally slower speeds due to small processors/specs 2.) No redundancy in PSU, controller, or OS!! (That's a big one) 3.) More difficult to repair/replace components 4.) Cost more than standard server when you want 5+ bays 5.) Cheap controller cards And almost every SAN is guilty of the following: 1.) Expensive! Hope that helps

In my area I'm seeing a lot of CCTV veterans who, in an attempt to keep up with new IP based systems, install them and forget to consider basic networking principles that, unless accommodated, become hell for IT dudes. Not saying every camera technician needs their CCNA, but when they start touching some of these complex networks I start raising an eyebrow haha.

You [probably won't be] surprised how many hotels have their guestnet and corpnet combined. The first time I noticed it was in 2004. Grabbed the credit card database and confirmed that my CC was on there, then ran down to the lobby to pay with cash and asked that my CC be reversed and removed from the system. Night Audit said it was deleted, but I ended up going back to the database file and deleting my card entry altogether. It sparked an investigation a few months later and we ended up discovering that same hotel chain had ~4,200 locations with this issue at the time. If I had to guess, I'd say about a thousand of them are still operating under this flaw.

Impressed with the research you've been doing morek. Kind of makes me laugh that these statements are all true at the same time: 1.) Dahua makes buggy firmware (mostly the security loopholes I'm referring to.) [And] 2.) Firmware is incredibly sensitive and can updating can brick a device. [but..] 3.) Cannot get firmware from Dahua which would end many consistency issues. [Yet...] 4.) Cannot FIX firmware issues yourself based on how they code it.

Makes sense -- I figure the servers at each location are used as a gateway to also reduce bandwidth between the site and HQ?

Out of curiosity what do you do then with the VMS box? Is that sitting at one location and all cams point to that?

I almost feel like 32 NAS boxes is a headache waiting to happen. Also the actual files that you would be transferring from each NAS would probably be more bandwidth than to just stream each camera to one (or a few) source(s). Is there a 4-8 channel NVR box that allows you to connect and record to it from the outside? If so, that would be my recommendation assuming it can consolidate the streams at each site to reduce total bandwidth at each site. However if that method really doesn't reduce bandwidth, then 32 sites with 4-8 cameras... 12-20MB/second. Jjust make sure your main site has a fancy internet connection on it. I guess my whole point is 32 hard drive driven boxes is a lot to maintain after a little while.

(Their IT company is outsourced and most likely charges 90-180 dollars an hour. To have them come in and modify the network is usually a little bit of a hassle for a small office like that. Just to get ports opened up was probably billed at like .75 hours.)