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jaa
Premium Member
join:2000-06-13

1 edit

jaa

Premium Member

Re: Storage Array

We have surveillance systems we use - video search and other features. The company I subcontract to (I do the computer work) is familiar with that system.

Our "usual" is 200Gb per camera, which typically gets 1 to 2 months of recording. This system will replace an existing system that has cameras that record 640x480.

I'm looking for about 50Tb of RAID-protected storage. Throughput is not an issue - a single SATA 7200 drive can easily handle all the recording needs of a 32-camera system, so any array should be able to handle 4 computers.

I was looking at Synology as a low-end (low-cost) array.

RS2212+ is a 10-disk unit that we could start with with 4TB drives, and if needed add another 12-disk expansion unit.

koitsu
MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
Humax BGW320-500

koitsu

MVM

Regardless of who/what company you go with, please make sure you do two things: 1) get a support contract and keep it active, and 2) do regular backups. I cannot stress these two points enough when relying on a black-box vendor.

When/if you have issues with your filer, all questions/issues should go to the vendor -- you have to be 100% reliant on them for everything (that's both a blessing and a curse).

The need for backups (preferably to something that you have full control over and involves less vendor lock-in) is important, because you should assume that at some point you will encounter problems with your filer. And of course make sure you actually do/try a restoration in advance, rather than wait until that dreadful day when everything goes belly-up only to find out that your backups are hosed.

I also recommend asking whichever vendor you go with up front if they provide the hard disks for you or if you can use/purchase your own. You'd be surprised how much this matters. In the case of NetApp, for example, the filers I've worked with require you use disks sent to you from NetApp directly. There are a lot of (very justified) reasons for this, but it also means taking drive failures seriously, as (depending on your support contract terms) it might take multiple days to get a replacement drive from the vendor. On the flip side, if you're able to use your own disks, you might be unhappily surprised one day when model XYZ123 disappears from the market and XYZ124 appears, only to find that the LBA counts have changed and the filer requires all media to have matching LBA counts -- or possibly you get bit by a drive firmware issue (they're becoming more and more common).

Just stuff to consider before making a purchase.
HarryH3
Premium Member
join:2005-02-21

HarryH3 to jaa

Premium Member

to jaa
Listen to what koitsu is tellin' ya. When those monster arrays are working right they are awesome. But sometimes they fail in mysterious ways... My BIL managed a group a couple years back that was using a 96-disk SAN, 2TB on each disk. It was attached to racks of servers, virtualized out the wazoo, used by other groups in the company, on a worldwide basis. (Think about servers with 1TB of RAM and hundreds of VM's running at a time!) NONE of the groups that were USING the systems wanted to spend the money for a 2nd SAN to keep backups. Then one day the SAN just locked up. Solid. Remote support couldn't fix it; onsite support couldn't fix it. They ended up shipping the entire SAN array back to the vendor for their engineering folks to figure out what the hell went wrong.... So yeah, the technology is freakin' awesome, until it isn't.

jaa
Premium Member
join:2000-06-13

jaa to koitsu

Premium Member

to koitsu
I will look at support contracts. No backups though. It is storing surveillance video, if it is lost no big deal - just reformat and start over.

koitsu
MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
Humax BGW320-500

koitsu

MVM

Ah good. As long as everything can be lost in the case of utter failure, you'll be fine. Otherwise stories like this are ones I use to drive my point home:

»it.slashdot.org/comments ··· 43325049

Let us know what you end up going with + what you roll out!