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lorenzoj

Back end storage - iSCSI or NFS?

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Hi

I'm not new to the world of IP cameras - for the last 4 years or so I've had several cameras at my house. Over the years I've upgraded them as I've played with new models and newer technology has become available. Currently I have 15 high resolution (2 MP minimum) cameras at my house. I've played with several NVR software platforms, and for the last several years have used Blue Iris.

Local storage is an array of SSDs, so plenty fast, but after 30 days I have Blue Iris move recordings to archive storage. I have about 3 years of recordings, on a 7TB partition of which I'm using the majority of. Currently the 7TB is on an external NAS, and I have an iSCSI LUN mounted in windows, so accessed as a local drive, although it resides on network storage.

With the NAS device I have, I have the ability to create an iSCSI storage LUN which I can then attach to the blue iris DVR (as I have been for several years now), OR I can create a windows share, and map a drive to the share.

I'm in the process of rebuilding the NAS, which as you can imagine, copying 7TB of data is taking a while to back up, but I don't intend on getting rid of footage. If there ever was a time to pick between iSCSI and plain windows shares (NFS), this is it.

 

Looking for any suggestions or input on whether to use iSCSI or NFS. I have plenty of space left - more than double in fact - so regardless which option I go extra storage isn't the problem.

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First off,

Please tell why anyone would have a reason to keep 3 years of video?

If you are not aware of event in 90 days you never will.

lol...maybe hes making a documentary of his life

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Neither. sftp. It's not as easy as iSCSI nor as bloated a dinosaur as NFS, but it gives military-grade directory-level security on the NAS.

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I don't keep the footage only for security reasons - It's been great looking back over the years at my kids growing up. Storage is so cheap these days, I have no reason not to. I have 20TB of storage available, so why not keep it!

 

Hadn't looked into sftp, and "military-grade directory-level security" isn't really a concern of mine, but I guess I could look into it.

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Storage is so cheap these days

 

Maybe in a residential environment where it's not critical.

 

In a production environment where redundancy and speed are key, it's close to 1000 US dollars per Terabyte.

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Why NFS? It is a little-used platform compared to alternatives and is primarily oriented towards the Unix O/S.

 

I personally prefer DAS to NAS but that is basically due to my system design preferences and the redundancy and capacity requirements of our Enterprise system (700TB total storage recording a total bit rate for all cameras of approximately 4,000Mb per second). Our servers have both stream and bit rate limitations so our 1,200 cameras must be divided up to multiple servers. Although that doesn't totally preclude NAS, it does make it more difficult to design and implement.

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Storage is so cheap these days

 

Maybe in a residential environment where it's not critical.

 

In a production environment where redundancy and speed are key, it's close to 1000 US dollars per Terabyte.

 

Guess it's a good thing we're not talking about a production environment where redundancy and speed are key isn't it...

 

Also, even in a "production environment", storage is still exponentially cheaper than it was 10 years ago.

And not sure where you get the "1000 US dollars per Terabyte" - redundancy and speed are relative. If you want 10mm IOPS, then $10000/terabyte is not even going to be a drop in a bucket. If your redundancy is single drive failure, then it's more like $120/terabyte. See where I'm going with this?

Even the term 'production environment' is relative. I think the term you were looking for was "Enterprise environment".

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