FreeNAS as DVR for IP cameras?

[tvsjr]

So 2 circuits , but one UPS ? Not sure what "battery charger for the extended battery pack" would be as stand alone devices, but basically no redundancy of UPS failure , right ? So if on the first circuit the UPS goes down, everything goes down, right ?

Correct. The Cyberpower UPS I have has an external battery pack attached. The battery pack has its own charger (you can have up to 10 of them on one UPS, and the UPS by itself isn't capable of charging that much battery in any reasonable period of time).

The house only has a single feed from the local utility, so I'm not too worried about it. I've got ~2hrs. to get power back, or to transfer to generator (which, today, involves an external generator and cord... but in the future will be automatic, with a generator sized to run the whole house).

 

[Black Ninja]

So if the UPS breaks (not loses power, but dies, like smoke coming out of it.) Does everything go down, or the servers will keep run on the battery unit (connected to shore power) till UPS is replaced?

 

[tvsjr]

No, the battery pack just extends the runtime of the UPS. If the UPS goes up in smoke, everything's down. This is a home environment, so while downtime might be irritating, it's not like I'm going to lose zillions of dollars.

 

[Black Ninja]

Well mine is home environment too, but If I can get good deal on UPSs I don't see why not make it better more robust . I would assume you don't run your FreeNAS out of one PSU? Since it don't cost you much to run both and have redundancy from PSUs failure.

Besides, have a dual UPSs is much cheaper than "...automatic, with a generator sized to run the whole house" :)

 

[tvsjr]

We all have our level of paranoia. If the UPS lets the smoke out, I'm going to have considerable issues anyway (namely, keeping the house from burning down). I chose an enterprise-grade unit that I can easily and cost-effectively procure replacement batteries for, do most maintenance (including battery replacement) while the unit is running, etc.

And, the generator is intended to fix much more than just the server closet. If we have a major outage (tornadoes being the biggest threat), I want to be able to run refrigerator/freezers, etc. as well, basically stay comfortable in my own home.

 

[Black Ninja]

I chose an enterprise-grade unit that I can easily and cost-effectively procure replacement batteries for, do most maintenance (including battery replacement) while the unit is running, etc.

I think you said it yourself. :)
Same reason with dual UPS, it will give you the convenience to replace or upgrade UPS, change PDU, change cables, etc. unit without the need to power down anything on your network (assuming all have dual PSU). Of course you can second PSU of the server to shore power while ups is out , and hope power won't cut while your are working on it. I did my system of Dual PSU - Dual UPS - Dual Circuits mostly because of the convenience of doing all the maintenance without disruption of the network. And redundancy/reliability came as a bonus on top of that.



P.S
I am not that much worried about the "smoke" coming out of it, it was just an example I used, cause I thought you misunderstood me when I said "ups down" as ups power is down. What I meant was hardware failure.

The whole generator thing is very nice, I wish I had that.:)

 

[tvsjr]

It's not in yet, but my plan is a diesel Cummins on the order of 75KW, with sufficient fuel on site to run it for a week at full load.

 

[Black Ninja]

Oh that's nice . You'll have enough power for both of us, so I can plug in too.:)


P.S. I have an account with Cummings, if case you need spare parts.

 

[cobrakiller58]

I am implying that is irrelevant. Your DVR (FreeNAS serving as DVR) accept steams of digital data (FTP/NFS) it doesn't care about your FPS, resolution, color, etc. it only cares about how many clients send data and how fast , and is writing into a file.

Perhaps you are confused somewhere along the conversation, or perhaps we are talking about different things.

Changing the camera's FPS directly affects how much data is being sent to the receiving device, so we are on the same page. I was curious why you said it is irrelevant?

 

[wblock]

FreeNAS rule is 1gig to 1TB.

Not exactly. This is a guideline, not a rule. In other words, this is a starting point for an estimate. It's also probably not linear, depending on usage.

 

[Black Ninja]

Changing the camera's FPS directly affects how much data is being sent to the receiving device, so we are on the same page. I was curious why you said it is irrelevant?

What I meant was that resolution, color, codec, fps etc. are irrelevant for the FreeNAS DVR itself. Because FreeNAS cares (like you said) how much data is sent. It doesn't care if 200MB is 720p/30FPS video or if it's 200MB of 1080p/15 FPS. From FreeNAS perspective it is still 200MB data. That's what I meant.

Of course changing camera parameters like: resolution, fps, etc. will increase or decrease amount of data sent.

 

[Black Ninja]

Not exactly. This is a guideline, not a rule. In other words, this is a starting point for an estimate. It's also probably not linear, depending on usage.

You are absolutely correct, but I think with 96TB and 16GB ram He is stretching all the rules

 

[fracai]

What I meant was that resolution, color, codec, fps etc. are irrelevant for the FreeNAS DVR itself. Because FreeNAS cares (like you said) how much data is sent. It doesn't care if 200MB is 720p/30FPS video or if it's 200MB of 1080p/15 FPS. From FreeNAS perspective it is still 200MB data. That's what I meant.

Of course changing camera parameters like: resolution, fps, etc. will increase or decrease amount of data sent.

Right, so 720p is 1280x720 and 1080p is 1920x1080. Let's just say 16bpp and we won't factor in compression or encoding. That's 14MB per frame for 720p and 31.6MB for 1080p.
That means 200MB of 720p/30FPS will be .48 seconds as the bitrate is 420MBps. 1080p/15FPS is 474 MBps or .42 seconds.
So yeah, reducing the FPS is indeed a way to get higher resolution at similar bitrate.

If your DVR, FreeNAS or dedicated hardware can handle 240FPS@1080p (8 cameras) and 480FPS@720p (16 cameras) it could probably also handle 16 cameras @ 1080p if they are recording at 15 FPS or even less.

On re-reading the original article it even mentions that "a lower framerate than 15 that will make video no longer seem fluid and more like a slideshow". Sure, but even a 7 FPS "slideshow" is good enough for security monitoring.
It seems like ultimately everyone is in agreement on recording capabilities.

I do think the article is putting too high of a limit on the minimum framerate, but they are trying to sell their DVRs. That's fine, but their glossing over other options is a bit disingenuous.

 

[hoserama]

I have a Ubuntu VM running a Ubiquiti NVR software. It records my three Ubiquiti 1080p IP cameras without any problems. I have a single core and 1024MB memory dedicated to this VM.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Black Ninja]

If your DVR, FreeNAS or dedicated hardware can handle 240FPS@1080p (8 cameras) and 480FPS@720p (16 cameras) it could probably also handle 16 cameras @ 1080p if they are recording at 15 FPS or even less.

That's possible , but still this is not the way you measure what your FreeNAS/dvr can handle.

If you buy a external hdd from the store, it's performance is measured in read/write speeds in MB/s not in FPS or resolution. I don't understand where the confusion is coming from.


P.S. I like my cameras (4) to record 1080p/30Fps constantly, like the way they are set now. Unless you need longer recording times (which you can compensate with adding more storage) I don't see why not use the full capabilities of the cameras.

 

[fracai]

FPS matters just like resolution matters.
FPS * resolution * cameras = MB/s
Of course the HDDs and DVR are going to report what they can handle in MB/s. But you can calculate what that is going to be and modify it based on what your cameras can be set to.

It's fine that you want your cameras set to 1080p/30FPS. But there are other considerations and the article you posted ignored some of those. Longer recording times is one, but there is also how fast the HDD can write, available network bandwidth, available CPU time, etc. Those are all reasons that someone might reduce the recording capabilities. I personally dropped from 1080p to 720p and 30 to 7 FPS because it significantly reduced the processor and bandwidth requirements. I have plenty of disk space.

 

[hescominsoon]

I'm using a Gigabyte motherboard with a Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz. I'm running 16 Gigs of RAM for right now but it's using 98% of it. FreeNAS rule is 1gig to 1TB. So I'd need at least 96 gig of RAM. From all I have been reading FreeNAS loves RAM. The processor is cold it hardly even gets used. I'm running that netdata app that's included in FreeNAS 11. Of all the resources the RAM is the heaviest hit it pretty much stays maxed out.

You have to understand I'm learning something new everyday. I just jumped into FreeNAS a month or so ago. I'm really new at this. This was my first FreeNAS system I built. I have 2 more sitting here I have to build. The 2 most valuable things I've learned so far is... I didn't put my LSI 9211-8i into IT mode :( , But that is fixable. The second thing was RAM and ECC RAM. I'm going to end up changing out that motherboard in that system since it doesn't support ECC RAM. Hey we learn from our mistakes and the learning part is what NOT to do next time right? lol

I'm a heavy Linux user so I've always seen this FreeNAS in the corner of my eye and kind of brushed it off because I was building Ubuntu Servers running NFS for storage. Also I was running a lot of ESXi. I really like ESXi for it's simplicity, but I learned the hard way ESXi does NOT monitor your drives, Lucky I have Idrac running on my servers to notify me. It's just a pain to work with ESXi especially the free version they want you to mortgage your home to get a license. I started looking into Xen Server for storage, but again not really user friendly try adding a hard drive to Xen!

My goal is to run FreeNAS as a storage server, but to replace my ESXi one day I'm learning the VM part now. Each day I just keep reading and reading.

You will see your mahcine using nearly 100% of the ram at all times. That is how Unix based systems work. As long as you are not digging into swap you are fine.

 

[hescominsoon]

Too much CPU for just a FreeNAS. I would remove one cpu , and swap the other for something XxxxxL for better power consumption.

You can never have too much cpu...:) if they can afford the power costs that's their issue. Depending on how much data is saving to the FN those cpus could come in handy. If they wanted to save power then do not remove one jsut switch both to an L series for their motherboard...IF they want to.

 

[hescominsoon]

Ripping a chip, maybe (although this may limit the number of RAM sticks and PCIe slots you can use, depending on motherboard configuration). An -L processor is simply capped to not exceed a certain speed. It idles at the same power consumption as a non-L part. But, by not capping it, you have the extra performance when the system demands it.

That's not always true. In my R710 the l5640 has 6 hyperthreaded cores at a lower clockspeed..but still draws less power. I went from 4 HT cores per socket each drawing a max of 95 Watts to 6 HT cores per socket at 65 Watts. The L series usually has a lower per core clockspeed but there are more than a few occasions where you get more cores AND the lower TDP as well.

 

[tvsjr]

Except those wattages only occur at 100% load. Those are NOT continuous consumption numbers. Fact of the matter is, assuming roughly the same architecture/family of chip, you're going to consume about the same number of watt-hours for a given set of computations. And, going to an L processor with more cores typically means the clock rate is going to be substantially less, which can be a problem for single-threaded things like Samba, especially if you're trying to reach 10Gbps speeds.

In fact, a processor with more cores will actually consume more power at idle, especially slightly older chips that don't have the *very* aggressive power management of newer chips.

All these are reasons I'm still running dual E5s. I need two chips to let me use all the memory. There are slower chips, chips with less cores, lower TDP out there... but, since the processors idle most of the time anyway, I'm not going to save huge amounts of power by moving to one. And, I've got the performance when I need it (and if I start vMotioning a bunch of stuff around, it will spike up).