Design advice for 50 cam System

[motofield 0]

I'm currently tasked with upgrading/gradually replacing the IP Cam system at work. We have two Q-See NVRs with 42 Q-See cameras. Yes, I hate it.

 

I'm looking for advice on hardware and software to use as a replacement. My plan is to get hardware that will support about 20 cameras to start, but can scale up to the ~50 cameras we will need, and all the better if it can scale beyond that. I will migrate those 20 cameras off the Q-See system and gradually migrate more as funds allow. New cameras will not be Q-See. Probably Vivotek or Axis.

 

I work in a regulated industry, and we need to save 90 days of footage, 1280x720, 10 FPS. I estimate the system will need to support about 80TB of storage. D;

 

For software we will probably go with Exacqvision or Milestone. We have another facility that uses Exacqvision and it has been pretty good. If the hardware supports it we might try using Blue Iris at first for the 20 cameras and then change to Exacq or Milestone when we migrate the rest.

 

Due to the storage requirement I was thinking that a server + storage array might be the most flexible approach, but I am open to expertise. If a more typical build-out in a large ATX desktop form factor would work equally well I am open to that.

 

What level of processor and memory should I look for to support that many cameras with that much storage? Is Xeon better suited to the task than say Core i7?

 

Thank you.