FreeNAS as CCTV image store

[balanga]

Is anyone using FreeNAS as a store for CCTV images?

I'd be interested to know if anyone is using this sort of setup and could advise as to how to get it working.

 

[Ericloewe]

I've thought about it. I'd say it boils down to the following important points:

• Simplest method is to have the cameras dump their feed via FTP
• Trickier but more elegant would be a Windows/whatever OS the management software runs on machine doing the cool stuff and using FreeNAS as storage. This tends to imply iSCSI, unfortunately.

Other thoughts:

• ZFS might be overkill for CCTV - or it might not, if you're paranoid.
• Hardware requirements could be lowered with a simpler solution - however, hardware RAID tends to creep forward when we're talking about massive arrays. At that point, you might as well use ZFS.
• Fragmentation could be a complicated issue.
• Hardware must be sized to allow for scrubs/resilvers during normal operation without impacting the streams.