NAS Storage for Geovision 96 CH System

[cctv_down_under 0]

Hi,

 

I have an old site where there are 3 x 32 Input analogue Geovision systems, the client wants 6 Months storage - I am loathe to open the box and use all four slots for HDD's - having to re-install Geo, and I dont really want to use a raid controller.

 

I am pretty sure the mainboard has multiple nics - so was considering a NAS type setup - but was wondering if all 96 cams record at once, how it would go bandwidth and diks read/write speed wise.

 

has anyone atempted this and can the Geo map to a network drive?

 

Lastly, if it all records on network drives, and there are still large drives in the machines, can it be set as a fall back - ie when network stops, it will write to the local drives, I dont mean - write to the local drives then to the network drives, I mean ONLY use the local drives upon network failure?

[varascope 0]

Your thinking down the right path.

 

What is your frame rate per channel?

 

I would suggest setting up CMS V2 as this is a cleaner way of doing this without tons of configuration. This way you maintain local storage while recording on a secondary.

 

Hard drives are cheap and a few 4TB drives WD Red should get you 6 months. We have a customer with 32 channels that is about 11 months of storage with 6TB. 30fps with a medium bitrate. What is your motion percentage across all cameras?

 

Your network load can take a hit unless you use dual NICS with Gigabit.

 

One complaint clients had was Geovision having a corrupted DB on network drives, but not 100% sure as I havn't touched Geo in years

[gb5102 0]

Bandwidth and disk requirements can vary greatly...you could set up perfmon on the DVRs to determine the avg/peak disk bandwidth over the course of a day(s). But realistically I don't think 1GB ethernet will have any problem with 96 analog cams. If you figure real throughput of ~900mbps on Gig-E, that gives you ~9mbps per cam which is a pretty high bitrate for compressed d4 video. But some kind of load-balancing/failover could help with reliability.

 

GV System can only record to NAS via iSCSI, which makes the network storage appear as a local-attached disk. Just be sure to create separate iSCSI LUNs on the NAS for each DVR- with NTFS filesystem there can only be 1 read/write connection per LUN or you will experience corruption.

 

Also the only way I can think of to fall back on the local storage in the DVRs would be using Center V2 as suggested by varascope. The DVRs would continue recording to their local storage in the event the network connection is lost. But on the other hand a solid network and buisness-grade NAS should have little to no downtime anyways

[cctv_down_under 0]

Thnaks Guys, I have not used Geo in an age, last time i did the CMS was just a motion or alarm activated montioring station, are you saying that it now can be recorded directly, to it, would the viewlog file see this as standard?

 

I might just open the box's and put in 4 drives, just means reloading the OS and I am not even sure the bios will se the 4tb drives, but certainly seems cheaper and easier with less chance of corruption - just hate opening 3- 4yr old machines - something always goes awry.

 

I assuming there is no way to "overnight backup" these devices (just too much data I assume) ie they would have to be offline to back up for far too long.

[gb5102 0]

are you saying that it now can be recorded directly, to it, would the viewlog file see this as standard?

GV System will stream a copy of the live video to cms, can set cms to record 24x7 or just motion/io/etc events. Also video playback would have to be done thru cms, at least for the oldest video, recent video would be available on the DVRs local storage just like it is now. AFAIK viewlog can't access the video stored in Center V2.

 

 

I might just open the box's and put in 4 drives, just means reloading the OS

Instead of reinstalling the OS, what about imaging existing OS onto new drive using Acronis or something similar? You could also check out multi-bay eSATA enclosures, but the proprietary internal power supplies in the cheaper ones scare me, and the commercial-grade rackmount units are kinda expensive

 

I assuming there is no way to "overnight backup"

you could put a few of the new 4tb drives into USB enclosures, connect to DVRs and leave them copy, come back in a day or so to install the drives internally. I would use Unstoppable Copier so the transfer doesn't die halfway through which would be pretty annoying...

[cctv_down_under 0]

Thnaks

[tomdlgns 0]

Bandwidth and disk requirements can vary greatly...you could set up perfmon on the DVRs to determine the avg/peak disk bandwidth over the course of a day(s). But realistically I don't think 1GB ethernet will have any problem with 96 analog cams. If you figure real throughput of ~900mbps on Gig-E, that gives you ~9mbps per cam which is a pretty high bitrate for compressed d4 video. But some kind of load-balancing/failover could help with reliability.

 

GV System can only record to NAS via iSCSI, which makes the network storage appear as a local-attached disk. Just be sure to create separate iSCSI LUNs on the NAS for each DVR- with NTFS filesystem there can only be 1 read/write connection per LUN or you will experience corruption.

 

Also the only way I can think of to fall back on the local storage in the DVRs would be using Center V2 as suggested by varascope. The DVRs would continue recording to their local storage in the event the network connection is lost. But on the other hand a solid network and buisness-grade NAS should have little to no downtime anyways

 

why can it only record to NAS via iscsi?

 

you can't map a drive to a \\nas-share? mapping a drive would allow you create a drive letter for the drive (e:, g:, etc....) Geovision wouldn't see that?

[tomdlgns 0]

Thnaks Guys, I have not used Geo in an age, last time i did the CMS was just a motion or alarm activated montioring station, are you saying that it now can be recorded directly, to it, would the viewlog file see this as standard?

 

I might just open the box's and put in 4 drives, just means reloading the OS and I am not even sure the bios will se the 4tb drives, but certainly seems cheaper and easier with less chance of corruption - just hate opening 3- 4yr old machines - something always goes awry.

 

I assuming there is no way to "overnight backup" these devices (just too much data I assume) ie they would have to be offline to back up for far too long.

 

why would you need to re-install geovision? add/upgrade the drives that are used for video storage, leave the main drive with geovision as is.

 

is the system 64 bit? you will have issues with those drive sizes with a 32 bit OS.

 

edit- the 32/64 bit is only an issue if you are using windows xp OS. what OS does the geovision pc run on?

[thewireguys 3]

Synology has some great units that work well via iSCSI. Just put a good nic card in your DVR and you should be good to go.

 

http://www.synology.com/en-us

[tomdlgns 0]

Synology has some great units that work well via iSCSI. Just put a good nic card in your DVR and you should be good to go.

 

http://www.synology.com/en-us

 

why is iscsi needed? a geovision pc can't see a mapped drive?

[thewireguys 3]

Synology has some great units that work well via iSCSI. Just put a good nic card in your DVR and you should be good to go.

 

http://www.synology.com/en-us

 

why is iscsi needed? a geovision pc can't see a mapped drive?

 

Not sure if it can or can not. I like iSCSI and have found it it to be easy to setup and works reliably.

[tomdlgns 0]

Synology has some great units that work well via iSCSI. Just put a good nic card in your DVR and you should be good to go.

 

http://www.synology.com/en-us

 

why is iscsi needed? a geovision pc can't see a mapped drive?

 

Not sure if it can or can not. I like iSCSI and have found it it to be easy to setup and works reliably.

 

understandable and nothing wrong with that. i wouldn't bother with iscsi unless it was needed or there was a benefit to using it.

[gb5102 0]

well technically you can use a mapped drive, but I had some issues with recording randomly stopping and recycling not working properly, and support@geovision.tw advised iSCSI. No problems since switching over ~ 2yrs ago and I've used it on a couple of systems so far.

 

So it seems iSCSI is the more reliable choice