How many cameras???

[radix]

Please provide information on how many cameras will this systems support? Will I be able to connect 30 - 40 - 50 - 60 of Axis cameras???

Hardware is not important, what about software?

[coke]

Never hit the montage button.

[radix]

really important Q for me, I have intention to build surveillance system over 6 buildings, thats about 60 cameras...

[jameswilson]

technically yes, but depends on framerate required

a top end machine (say quadcore multiple bus mobo) will do 200-250 fps at cif with detection

but at that with vga your gonna be pushing 7 1/2 meg to disk per second

so a fast disk sub system will be needed

ie you dont have a lot of overhead even with fast disks

And yes i know disks can sustain 20-30 meg a second but thats large files, not hundreds of 30-40k files per second.

if you ran your ip cams at 2 fps each and had a lot of hardware and 2 networks i/f then id say 60 cams was fine.

But then you need to view and thats more traffic on the system.
So with care as an educated guess id say yes, but personally id never go above 30 ish per box

[radix]

I'd say this should be enough

Quad Core Xeon X3323, 2.5GHz, 2x6MB, 1333MHz FSB
2x PCI-E Riser Cards (2x PCI-E Slots)
4GB 1CPU (4x1GB Single Rank DIMMs) 667MHz
2 x 146 GB SAS 15k 3.5" HD Hot Plug
SAS 6iR internal RAID controller, PCI-e
C6 - ASSR1, Add-in SAS/SATA RAID card, RAID1, 2 HOT PLUG HDDs
Hot-Plug with Redundant PSU Chassis
Internal SATA CD-RW/DVD-ROM Drive
R300 Open Manage Factory Install only
Sliding Combination Rapid/Versa Rail with CMA
3 Years Return To Distributor Warranty

thinking about creating virtual systems up to 4 virtual machines, 20 cameras on each, what you think about it? Network infrastructure will be created.

[ediaz]

my opinion??

Quad Core Xeon X3323, 2.5GHz, 2x6MB, 1333MHz FSB ?? please take 2, less micro, but you can put 8 cores..

(what linux do you want to use?)

Memory? for my taste I use more 8Gb.. I use 100M per camera at less.

hard disk? only two? who many time do you want to save?

Please put update and link I love try this

if need help!!

regards!

Zoneminder is the best..

[coke]

I'm with him on both points. I'd find something with at least 8 cores (2 quads), and WAY more disk space. Disk space is cheap. For about $1000 you can get a 4 terabyte drobo, handles it's own raid.

And having multiple networks wouldn't hurt, either. If possible put the cameras on separate switches than your other machines, maybe stick multiple net cards in the machines and connect one to each switch?

If you have the right Axis cameras, they can do the motion detection themselves, which would definitely help cut down your CPU usage.

And really, if you ever hit the montage button, something will melt.

[radix]

don't forget this is 15k hard drives, they are very fast and expensive too, don't wan't to do all this on sata drives, one 15K equals about 3 sata drives in stripe raid mode. Plus we are thinking about using IP cameras, they should generate mpeg files and do motion detection, but due to that it might be possible that we will have about 300 connection on a peak to look at cams ( external users ) I am very interested how much resourses then it will use...

We are thinking about Ubuntu or Debian, have not decided... It's not something we are sure we gonna do, but if this project will go on, it will be first so huge public are monitored by such system, so I guess it'll be interesting and very useful for all users of zone minder

[cordel]

In your thinking you might want to consider that mpeg is still kind of a experimental feature and at the moment there are only two IP camera makers on our Compatibility list for mpeg. Axis and Acti.

[haynesl]

Please provide information on how many cameras will this systems support? Will I be able to connect 30 - 40 - 50 - 60 of Axis cameras???

Hardware is not important, what about software?

My establishment has 60 axis 207 cameras. I personally don't think any computer hardware however 'fancy' can record that many cameras at 640x480 pixels at a reasonable frame rate of 4+fps with software motion detection. You'd have to trade fps, image size, and maybe software motion detection.

I have a number of modest computers running 8 cameras each at 4fps @ 640x480 and thats about the limit. They are single AMD 64bit 4200 dual core 1GB RAM. They run near maximum with enough to do archives etc. Do the maths. Processing all them jpg's is alot of work and cpu heavy. They also record on motion which if not a requirement could free up lots of cpu.

Putting hardware aside, the software is more than capable using proven SQL database and Apache web server.

I'd like to hear your outcome so let us all know the results

[Kiwitech]

I am sorry if I am too late but I could not help but be astounded. Why on earth would you want to connect that many camera's to 1 system? First of all the cost would be insane ... secondly the logistics of getting that many camera's all back to 1 place boggle's my mind. If you wish to continue on this path I would strongly suggest fibre data to all the camera's and several servers running the software.

Personally I would run smaller servers in each of the buildings and then tie it all back to a single web server with links to the six units. There is no way anybody with a normal DSL internet connection could view 60 camera's at a time anyway. Also if you do manage to get 60 camera's working on a single system it will be working extremely hard and prone to break downs. IN this case its all over Rover. 6 Smaller units would be nowhere near as taxed and will run for much longer without any issues and if one should break down you still have the other 5.

Just my thoughs

ps: I do have some idea of what I am talking about ... although i have no experience with ZM I have been doing cctv for 9 years now. the largest system I have been involved with has been 85 Camera's for a city center. This was all brought back through to 4 custom made identical units by Bosch. One of the units was maxed at 32 Cams and the rest shared the remainder ... guess which one gave us all the issues?

[cphjst]

To caculate Axis have a design toll:
http://www.axis.com/products/video/desi ... /index.htm

[curtishall]

I agree for the most part. Secondly I really don't think ZM is the best fit for this application without alot of customization on the montage view, the way it handles buffering and individual images it saves to disk.

I am sorry if I am too late but I could not help but be astounded. Why on earth would you want to connect that many camera's to 1 system? First of all the cost would be insane ... secondly the logistics of getting that many camera's all back to 1 place boggle's my mind. If you wish to continue on this path I would strongly suggest fibre data to all the camera's and several servers running the software.

Personally I would run smaller servers in each of the buildings and then tie it all back to a single web server with links to the six units. There is no way anybody with a normal DSL internet connection could view 60 camera's at a time anyway. Also if you do manage to get 60 camera's working on a single system it will be working extremely hard and prone to break downs. IN this case its all over Rover. 6 Smaller units would be nowhere near as taxed and will run for much longer without any issues and if one should break down you still have the other 5.

Just my thoughs

ps: I do have some idea of what I am talking about ... although i have no experience with ZM I have been doing cctv for 9 years now. the largest system I have been involved with has been 85 Camera's for a city center. This was all brought back through to 4 custom made identical units by Bosch. One of the units was maxed at 32 Cams and the rest shared the remainder ... guess which one gave us all the issues?

[newvisionantenna]

You would be a great candidate for our Wireless Mesh network builder.

secondly the logistics of getting that many camera's all back to 1 place boggle's my mind. If you wish to continue on this path I would strongly suggest fibre data to all the camera's and several servers running the software.

I notice this guy saying it boggle's his mind. Right now we have people with ASUS 520gu's costing less then 20$ running entire neighborhood wireless distrubution. These same devices work with our new Camera Mesh builder. All you would need is several of these around your site and then plug your IP camera's into them and or connect wirelessly to the WPA encrypted Mesh network. They all talk to each other and get their IP's from one central point where your Zoneminder server would be local. This would then allow Zoneminder to see all 60 of your feeds. Plus each point in the mesh runs a heartbeat that can be tracked on my DVD's admin panel so you would know exactly where the problem is.


About the montage view, you don't have to use the montage view anymore if you have local access to the server. You can run QT viewer right on the desktop. So far it's pretty impressive, not sure how it would hold up a large amount of cams.

I found a link for live AXIS feeds and so far have hit a constant 12 cam feeds on my latest 1.24.x DVD with the montage view up 24/7 and each feed at 640x480. This is all on a KVM install of my DVD that I've only given 1 GIG or ram to. Since i've made the switch to mmap memory in my install I don't have to setup anything, just plug in the cam info and boom it works.

[scriptman78]

I was curious if you have had a chance to test this. I know that ZM will definitely do what you want. You just need to have the right hardware.