Hi all...
We have an external vendor that's providing us security camera services which I believe could be better. In saying that, we are hitting roadblocks with expansions to our surveillance on our campus due to their suggestions to a previous set of leaders that were passive. With that said I'm trying to apply a bandage until we can go through our budgeting process to acquire funds.
What we have:
HP ProLiant ML350 Gen9 (Intel Xeon E5-2609 v4, 32GB Ram, 4TB of internal storage) with Mobile Server, xProtect Service Channel, and xProtect 2017 R3. Total of 58 cameras with an estimated projection of 150-200 through 7 buildings
HP ProLiant ML350 Gen9 (Intel Xeon E5-2609 v4, 32GB Ram, 4TB of internal storage) with Recording Server.
Cameras range in megapixel from 2.1 to 12
Ingested bandwidth ranges from 70-115 mbps depending on motion
Solutions:
- I think that we could upgrade the CPU's (since we are still on xProtect 2017) or upgrade to a newer version of xProtect to replace the CPU's and add a Nvidia card for hardware acceleration.
- Another option would be to migrate the physical server to our VMware cluster since our compute typically sits around 5-15% usage... We have (6) E5-2680 v3 @ 2.50GHz in our cluster but lack the 8TB's of storage... However, I just decommissioned a SAN from our production environment which contains 16TB's (raw) 10K drives. So, I could setup iSCSI again to our environment solely for the camera system.
The only problem I see is that both the 3 servers in our cluster and the physical camera servers need replaced by 2023-2024 which is right around the corner. Its another story but the idea was to eventually to consolidate our 4 physical servers into a VM cluster with 4 or 5 servers total and add more storage to the HP MSA (only using 6 bays out of the 24).