Need a 30TB RAID solution for CCTV

HindenPeter

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Aug 13, 2014
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Hey all! I want to preface this post by stating that I am by no means an IT professional, however I do know more and have a better understanding of computing technology than anyone I work with. I would much prefer to have them hire an IT professional, however there's no room in the budget for that at this time.

I work on a farm in WA, and we are implementing a huge security system for which I will need to store 45 consecutive days of footage, so I'm currently seeking a setup that will allow me to store 45 days of 960H CCTV video at 10fps, which we cannot afford to lose. After some preliminary tests, I discovered that we would need roughly 24TB to store all 45 days worth of footage from 35 CCTV cameras. I was able to convince my bosses that we should go with 30TB to be safe, and told them we may need more in order to account for drive failures. This is about the extent of my knowledge when it comes to business-class storage solutions, especially RAID arrays.

So my questions for you guys are as follows: which RAID controller(s) should I look at, which drives should I consider (I'm thinking 4TB drives to keep costs down which is of paramount importance to my bosses), and which RAID solution would be best to account for the high possibility of drive and read failures? My budget is about $5000 for all computing hardware, but if I can keep the costs lower, that would be excellent.

The only hardware that I know for sure I will be using is an Intel Core i5-4570 to eliminate the need for a graphics card to keep costs down. I will determine a motherboard, PSU, memory and case based on the responses I receive here. I will probably use a 64GB SSD as a boot drive.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate the help!
-HP
 
Solution
That's a terrific setup for high availability, but still not a backup.[/quotemsg]

OP state" " a huge security system for which I will need to store 45 consecutive days of footage, so I'm currently seeking a setup that will allow me to store 45 days of 960H CCTV video at 10fps, which we cannot afford to lose.

That is not back up storage, that needs a high availability, and reliability, which should be RAID6
It costs exactly $5,074.35 for RAID6+ Ons hot spare.

Or OP can use this low cost:
http://www.datoptic.com/ec/twelve-12-sataiii-raid-system-scalable-to-20-drives.html
- Redundant PSU
- 13x 3TB HDD configure as RAID6 and ONE spare drive
- Cost $3,434.35

There is NO other RAID6 would cost lower than this...

Quaddro

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i assume you'll use raid 5.
okay, as far as i know, mobo onboard raid is fake raid, so you right, go with pci/pcie raid controller..

well, this one Intel RS3WC080 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816117426) will give you 8 port for SAS/SATA drive setup..

for drive, of course go with SAS drive.
something like Western Digital RE WD4001FYYG 4TB 7200 RPM (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236353), is a good choice..

so, let's do simple arithmetic,
$320 + (8x $340), well, still $ 3040..less than $5k..
 

HindenPeter

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Aug 13, 2014
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I've been doing a bit of research into what each RAID solution is good for, and it seems like RAID 6 would be best for my needs. I've been reading that restoring from a RAID 5 array with this many bits will almost certainly lead to read errors during restoration, and that RAID 6 helps with this. As far as I can tell it's RAID 5 with one extra parity drive.

Thanks for your suggestions, I'll look into those items!
 

Lumber-jack

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Jun 30, 2013
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There is no guarantee with any RAID except that you will lose data the more you must recover - How much is up to you... It's simply formula and the more data you must recover the greater the error will be. Yes some RAIDs have lower error rates but there is a trade off of performance and $$$. If you are using RAID 6 you will need more HDD's and your budget it tight so RAID 5 might be what you have to live with. Perhaps you should tell us more about the need for redundancy and how critical it is. You have failed to even mention back up and no RAID is idiot proof and you must use RAID in conjunction with backup to cover all bases.

You must decide the priorities of:
budget, redundancy, backup

WD make purple drive for video recording. Have you also thought about keeping it simple and getting a NAS to do surveillance? Synology makes a great product and might save you allot of headache trying to get whatever you are building to work. Since you don't know much about this kind of thing perhaps this add cost will pay for itself in the long run.
 

TyrOd

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Aug 16, 2013
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You an't do this for $5k
If you can't afford to lose any recordings for 24h surveillance, not only do you need a proper dedicated backup,
you either need a proper enterprise SAN with internal psu/drive/NIC redundancy or a DIY server with some redundancy and a second identical server with DNS failover.

$5k wouldn't even pay for the drives in this setup, much less the 20k+ worth of storage "boxes" you'll need to support it.
 

FireWire2

Distinguished


I would highly recommend you to use a RACK MOUNT 16x slots with redundant PSU, populated 13x 3TB enterprise HDD or desktop Deskstar 3TB) in RAID6+HS.

- Redundant PSU - will protect your power supply failure.
- RAID6 will give you 2x drives failed protected.
- HS (hot spare) will give you immediate rebuild once a HDD failed.

BTW, you have many HS drives as you want, if data is importance and in remote location, then set up 2 or 3 HS.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111466&cm_re=sans_digital_3U-_-16-111-466-_-Product
http://www.datoptic.com/ec/3u-scale-able-sixteen-16-sas-sata-6gb-s-raid-with-40gb-s-bandwidth-sas-6gb-controller-included.html
 

TyrOd

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Aug 16, 2013
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That's a terrific setup for high availability, but still not a backup.
 

FireWire2

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That's a terrific setup for high availability, but still not a backup.[/quotemsg]

OP state" " a huge security system for which I will need to store 45 consecutive days of footage, so I'm currently seeking a setup that will allow me to store 45 days of 960H CCTV video at 10fps, which we cannot afford to lose.

That is not back up storage, that needs a high availability, and reliability, which should be RAID6
It costs exactly $5,074.35 for RAID6+ Ons hot spare.

Or OP can use this low cost:
http://www.datoptic.com/ec/twelve-12-sataiii-raid-system-scalable-to-20-drives.html
- Redundant PSU
- 13x 3TB HDD configure as RAID6 and ONE spare drive
- Cost $3,434.35

There is NO other RAID6 would cost lower than this...
 
Solution

TyrOd

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Aug 16, 2013
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OP state" " a huge security system for which I will need to store 45 consecutive days of footage, so I'm currently seeking a setup that will allow me to store 45 days of 960H CCTV video at 10fps, which we cannot afford to lose.

That is not back up storage, that needs a high availability, and reliability, which should be RAID6
It costs exactly $5,074.35 for RAID6+ Ons hot spare.

Or OP can use this low cost:
http://www.datoptic.com/ec/twelve-12-sataiii-raid-system-scalable-to-20-drives.html
- Redundant PSU
- 13x 3TB HDD configure as RAID6 and ONE spare drive
- Cost $3,434.35

There is NO other RAID6 would cost lower than this...[/quotemsg]

RAID has nothing to do with "can't afford to lose" data. It's for high availability if you can't afford any downtime.
Backup and RAID are 2 seperate things altogether, both of which the client needs for this system.

ANY single storage array is NEVER a replacement for a proper SEPARATE backup device, regardless of the redundancy in the system.

Backup is Backup. Redundancy is redundancy. If you can't understand the difference you have no business advising anyone, ESPECIALLY in the enterprise space.
 

TyrOd

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Aug 16, 2013
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You are correct if you don't use failover/off-site backup, but a second array of similar capacity as a backup device would bring the total cost closer to 10k

 

TyrOd

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Aug 16, 2013
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Tape would be a solid solution as well.
 

HindenPeter

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Aug 13, 2014
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Hey guys, thanks for all your answers! Sorry for the long delay on a reply. We have decided to go with TyrOd's solution from DAT Optic as well as an off-site storage server for backups which we will be leasing from OVH.