ZoneMinder Forums

Hi, I hope someone can help me. I have successfully tested Zoneminder 1.22.2 on a SuSE Professional 10.0 with 2 Axis IP cam on a PC Pentuim4, 512MB RAM, 250GB IDE HD; now I have to develope a system with 20 Axis cam that must be configured in "Record" mode 24hours a day.
What kind of hardware (processor an RAM) is raccommanded for this purpose? Is it acceptable to use IDE HD in raid 5 software, or SCSI is raccommanded?

Thanks in advance for your help
Vector

Software wise, ZM will do all this and more.

Depends on the size of the images, the fps and whether you want colour or B&W.

20 is possible in record, since record uses far less cpu than motion detection. You'll still need a fairly powerful PC, with a processor at the current top end, or just behind.

Ram you will need more of. 2gb is a good starting point, but leave some for future expansion. NEVER underspec memory, it's the cheapest way to achieve performance.

Disks - use single drives, pata, scsi or sata - whatever floats your particular boat, and with any RAID setup that you wish. If the data is critical, some redundancy is imperative. I recommend a seperate drive to that hosting your O/S. All that ZM requires is a reasonably fast drive that Linux can write to - up to you how you provide that.

You MUST work out how many days' recordings you wish to keep and size the volume accordingly. Even at the current largest ide size - ~500gb, is not going to keep more than a few days recordings of 20 cams, so likely you'll need to use some kind of striping or remote array.

Hi, thanks a lot fot your help. I Think that 20 cam x 1 fps (640x480) x 7 day of record will use about 600 GB of disk storage. I will realize it with a software linux RAID 5 with 4 500GB HD.

I think that the real problem of a server like this one is the load for CPU, RAM and bus to hard drives.

I think that the system will be implemented with 20 ipcam in "Record" mode, but I have to design the system to use MoRecord for all the 20 ipcam.
So my trouble are:
a) is it possible to realize that system with a single server, or I have to use 2 servers with additional hardware costs?
b) Are IDE or SATA HD able to read/write that volume of data at an acceptable speed?

Thanks for your help
Vector

I understand that you need motion detection, but we cannot say for sure that your rig will handle it. I would say yes at 320x240 but 640x480 needs 4 x the power.
Also raid 5 is very slow at writing. I would avoid raid 5 as the write performance is terrible, prob only 6meg per second on your rig. And takes a bit out of the host with the calcs

Hi, I have tested a SATA raid 5 software performance; I send a file (1 GB) from a PC A to a server S using netcat.
If both machines have a gigabit ethernet interface the transfer speed is about 15 MByte per second;
If both machines have a 100Mbit ethernet interface the transfer speed is about 8 Mbyte per second;

Now, I think that the main problem could be the CPU usage (20 ip cam in MoRecord mode!). In your opinion is it possible the following configuration?
- ip cam configured with motion detection inside the camera
- zoneminder record only when the ipcam internal motion detection works
- zoneminder does not use its motion detection feature

Using the ip cam internal motion detection feature could help the zoneminder-server CPU usage ... maybe

Thanks
Vector