Researching system for home use

[DigitalPackrat]

I am just starting to seriously research setting up a surveillance system for my house after having some stuff go missing recently. Anyways, I have ordered a Hikvision DS-2CD2032 to cut my teeth on and figure out camera angles and lenses but there are a bunch of unknowns I have with using Blue Iris.

My setup is more a resemblance of a small corporate network than a home setup. For power and network, I have a Dell Powerconnect 5524P which I am worried about as a single point of failure. It is in a stack with two other 5548 switches with a direct 10Gb and indirect secondary 10Gb link between the three switches. I am hoping to get away with using one of two existing Hyper-V servers to host the Blue Iris server with all access being remote preferably via web but I am not opposed to an excuse to upgrade or add hardware. Using the existing systems, it will either be a X5687 Xeon or E5-2620 V2 Xeon with the virtualized system running off a pure flash array, let's say 250GB dedicated to this system but that is flexible. I would prefer storage to be over SMB to one of two file servers and intend to allocate 10-20TB of 140TB combined storage but ISCSI is an option if SMB won't work. The storage system is one point I haven't found a definite answer on yet.

My theoretical implementation is 6-8 cameras, 3MP or better at a good bitrate via POE on a dedicated VLAN. If I use the current Hyper-V network connections, there is a 10Gb with 1Gb fallover which I hope is enough. I can setup a few dedicated 1Gb links if there is an advantage to that. The Blue Iris system would probably run Win7 but 8, 8.1, 10 and server OS's are a option with the server OS's licensing being covered by the host server, ie. free up to 2012r2 but I already have licenses for the others if they are better. One of my concerns of Blue Iris is how video files are stored. I have seen direct to disk thrown around many times but is this caching multiple feeds and writing in one streamlined feed or is this still multiple concurrent writes where I need to think about random I/O writes?

I am not too worried about remote access which will be via a PFsense firewall and a pathetic 300/20 connection but I am thinking about cut network connections. Can Blue Iris interface with a external input such as as 12v signal pulled high or low to force an immediate upload of a selected amount of video, say the last 5 minutes to a remote server. This could be FTP, SFTP or basically anything to a server in another state with a redundant WEB connection? I am just thinking hypothetically of someone trying to take stuff, noticing the cameras, getting through the security door, unbolting the servers from the rack and me not having access to the recordings. Actually, I could even put a third destination for recordings in a remote storage unit I have over a 1Gb line to.

 

[typo]

ok, so I JUST got into Blue Iris. Direct To Disc basically means BI isn't going to try and reencode the video stream - so you lose out on the option of re-encoding the file, adding overlays, or having BI rotate the image when saving. So yes, you need to worry about IOPS, but I don't think you're going to have an issue here.

Saving to SMB share should be fine, and your network is probably overkill, so you should be good there.

For the saving of files to an alternate location, I just have a robocopy command running every few minutes to copy new files. It'll copy partially written files too, which can't be opened properly, but when the source file is finally finished and saved, it'll recopy the entire file and that's readable.

 

[DigitalPackrat]

I think I get where your going with robocopy. Are the video streams saved in blocks? Ie. a new file written every 10 minutes or something with Blue Iris stringing them together on playback. I could see that working with something like robocopy where files older than x minutes in a specified location are copied and triggering that batch job with an external input.

 

[fenderman]

I think I get where your going with robocopy. Are the video streams saved in blocks? Ie. a new file written every 10 minutes or something with Blue Iris stringing them together on playback. I could see that working with something like robocopy where files older than x minutes in a specified location are copied and triggering that batch job with an external input.

You can tell blue iris how long to create each clip. Combine and cut. however if you disable combine and cut you can the clip size will depend on the motion trigger length and the pre and post recording times set in blue iris. You can also have blue iris record to 2 locations simultaneously without the use of robocopy.

 

[DigitalPackrat]

I have the first cam up and I can definitely say I am impressed with BI. CPU usage on the other hand is a bit extreme to the point where I don't think virtualizing BI will workout once I get more cams, ordered 8 more for 9 total.

So here's my tentative plan. E3-1275 v3 Xeon (basically an 3.5GHz i7 Haswell), 8GB RAM, two Samsung PM853T 480GB enterprise SSD's mirrored for boot and new clip storage. For archived storage rather than SMB to an existing storage server I am going to separate the storage array from the E5-2620 V2 HyperV server and give it to the BI server. It's old with 24x 2TB 7200RPM drives in RAID 6 with a hot spare on a LSI 8888ELP but should still keep up fine with BI storage. The down side is the BI server will have to do double duty as a file server which makes me lean toward 2012r2 Server. I already have licenses so is there any reason I should stay away from 2012r2 or not let the BI server do file server duties?