Help on surveillance system.

[YourRandomForumGuy]

I really don't know what topic to post in, but I am planning a surveillance system with 32 1920x1080 10 FPS streams, what system would you recommend to handle this?

 

Also I am talking about the specs of the PC to handle 32 FHD@10FPS streams. 

[leadeater]

This for a business? Probably better to talk with a security consultant company who will sell you software licenses required as well.

 

32 cameras isn't too much, even a reasonably modest server spec will be able to do that now days. I would recommend Milestone as the software and 2x SSD RAID 1 for the live data and then HDD RAID 6 with however many disks you need for the total capacity, this will depend on how long you need to keep the footage and if you do motion activated recording or not.

[YourRandomForumGuy]

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

This for a business? Probably better to talk with a security consultant company who will sell you software licenses required as well.

 

32 cameras isn't too much, even a reasonably modest server spec will be able to do that now days. I would recommend Milestone as the software and 2x SSD RAID 1 for the live data and then HDD RAID 6 with however many disks you need for the total capacity, this will depend on how long you need to keep the footage and if you do motion activated recording or not.

what server spec?

[leadeater]

18 minutes ago, YourRandomForumGuy said:

what server spec?

That is unfortunately a very broad question and hard to answer. CPUs now days are more than fast enough to handle this type of workload so it's going to matter very little, something like a dual socket Xeon 4214R, 5118R, 5220R will do fine or AMD EPYC dual socket 7272 or single socket 7402P. RAM wise you should fill each memory channel with a single DIMM, each CPU supports 6 channels so 6 DIMMs for the single socket AMD configuration and 12 for the dual socket Intel/AMD configurations. Just go with 8GB DIMMs, 6 or 12 of these will be plenty.

 

You really need to know how much storage you need before you can actually pick out a server platform to use, an HPE DL380 Gen10 might fine for you or a Dell R740xd, but if you need a lot more storage than those can hold you would need to look at different models with more HDD bays.

 

When it comes to video surveillance servers storage tends to be the most important, networking too if you cannot have 10Gb or greater connectivity to it. 32 1080p@10 FPS cameras isn't a whole lot of bandwidth though.

[YourRandomForumGuy]

20 minutes ago, leadeater said:

That is unfortunately a very broad question and hard to answer. CPUs now days are more than fast enough to handle this type of workload so it's going to matter very little, something like a dual socket Xeon 4214R, 5118R, 5220R will do fine or AMD EPYC dual socket 7272 or single socket 7402P. RAM wise you should fill each memory channel with a single DIMM, each CPU supports 6 channels so 6 DIMMs for the single socket AMD configuration and 12 for the dual socket Intel/AMD configurations. Just go with 8GB DIMMs, 6 or 12 of these will be plenty.

 

You really need to know how much storage you need before you can actually pick out a server platform to use, an HPE DL380 Gen10 might fine for you or a Dell R740xd, but if you need a lot more storage than those can hold you would need to look at different models with more HDD bays.

 

When it comes to video surveillance servers storage tends to be the most important, networking too if you cannot have 10Gb or greater connectivity to it. 32 1080p@10 FPS cameras isn't a whole lot of bandwidth though.

Thanks, would switching to 480P or 720P let me use a single 8 core instead?

[YourRandomForumGuy]

29 minutes ago, leadeater said:

That is unfortunately a very broad question and hard to answer. CPUs now days are more than fast enough to handle this type of workload so it's going to matter very little, something like a dual socket Xeon 4214R, 5118R, 5220R will do fine or AMD EPYC dual socket 7272 or single socket 7402P. RAM wise you should fill each memory channel with a single DIMM, each CPU supports 6 channels so 6 DIMMs for the single socket AMD configuration and 12 for the dual socket Intel/AMD configurations. Just go with 8GB DIMMs, 6 or 12 of these will be plenty.

 

You really need to know how much storage you need before you can actually pick out a server platform to use, an HPE DL380 Gen10 might fine for you or a Dell R740xd, but if you need a lot more storage than those can hold you would need to look at different models with more HDD bays.

 

When it comes to video surveillance servers storage tends to be the most important, networking too if you cannot have 10Gb or greater connectivity to it. 32 1080p@10 FPS cameras isn't a whole lot of bandwidth though.

Also is there any specific GPU requirement, other than a basic one for display output?

[leadeater]

13 minutes ago, YourRandomForumGuy said:

Thanks, would switching to 480P or 720P let me use a single 8 core instead?

The number of cameras will have more to do with the number of cores you should use. Our Milestone camera servers are dual Xeon 5118 with an average load of around 12%, I can't remember how many cameras we have per server but it's a lot so likely very similar to you. RAM usage is 12GB.

 

Edit:

Average network utilization is 220Mbps, it's basically this sustained the entire time.

 

 

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, YourRandomForumGuy said:

Also is there any specific GPU requirement, other than a basic one for display output?

Depends on software but generally no, none of our servers have a GPU other than the integrated one with the server. They are DL380 Gen9 so have a very basic GPU, like realllly basic.

[YourRandomForumGuy]

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

The number of cameras will have more to do with the number of cores you should use. Our Milestone camera servers are dual Xeon 5118 with an average load of around 12%, I can't remember how many cameras we have per server but it's a lot so likely very similar to you. RAM usage is 12GB.

 

 

wouldn't that mean you are using less than 4 cores, so would 2700X + 16GB ram work?

[leadeater]

Just now, YourRandomForumGuy said:

wouldn't that mean you are using less than 4 cores, so would 2700X + 16GB ram work?

Sort of, every core is active doing work. The danger in reducing cores is you risk getting dropped frames, CPU doesn't have to be 100% for this to happen. The CPU is over spec for the workload I agree however, it's just when buying servers like these not really worth buying lower end CPU than this.

 

If you want to go with a Ryzen system and be far more budget focused then a 2700X may well work but it'll be the absolute most it would do. You won't really want any of the cores to be an average load of more than 50%. If you can get a good deal on a 3900/3900X and don't already have a 2700X then that would be better, very much doubt any good deals for those will be around right now though

[YourRandomForumGuy]

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Sort of, every core is active doing work. The danger in reducing cores is you risk getting dropped frames, CPU doesn't have to be 100% for this to happen. The CPU is over spec for the workload I agree however, it's just when buying servers like these not really worth buying lower end CPU than this.

 

If you want to go with a Ryzen system and be far more budget focused then a 2700X may well work but it'll be the absolute most it would do. You won't really want any of the cores to be an average load of more than 50%. If you can get a good deal on a 3900/3900X and don't already have a 2700X then that would be better, very much doubt any good deals for those will be around right now though

thanks! the 2700X costs like 205$ in my area and the 3900X costs $470, also would a 1920X do? (they cost about 100-150$ less)

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, YourRandomForumGuy said:

thanks! the 2700X costs like 205$ in my area and the 3900X costs $470, also would a 1920X do? (they cost about 100-150$ less)

Yea probably, just check the price difference for the motherboard/platform though. Personally I would stick with AM4, deploy as many cameras as possible, if less than 32 hope it's as close to that is possible and plan to upgrade to the 3900X when the cost is more reasonable.

[Aragorn-]

Our CCTV server at work is a Dell R720, 8 core Xeon. Its recording 10 cameras a mixture of 1080p and 4k, and mostly 25fps, and the CPU doesnt even break a sweat.

 

Where you can run into issues is with machines that are doing the analytics on the PC/Server rather than the Camera. Doing that can very quickly overwhelm even a fairly decent CPU.

[YourRandomForumGuy]

On 2/11/2021 at 3:58 PM, leadeater said:

Yea probably, just check the price difference for the motherboard/platform though. Personally I would stick with AM4, deploy as many cameras as possible, if less than 32 hope it's as close to that is possible and plan to upgrade to the 3900X when the cost is more reasonable.

Ah! thanks, going for 3900X and 32GB RAM.

 

BTW sorry for responding late.