Hardware for 100-150 IP camera system?

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zeevy
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Sep 21, 2020 12:27 am

Hardware for 100-150 IP camera system?

Post by zeevy »

Hello All. I'm back to working on the cameras system for my properties. I've found this server for sale on eBay. It is $1,158 with a 60 day return policy.

HPE Proliant DL380 G9 24 | 1x 10C 2.6HZ | 32gb of ram | 2x 900gb.10k | P440

I believe it has quite a few more slots for more ram (24 total slots for 128gb - 3tb of ram depending on type), and more HD expansions. I believe I can add another processor which would double the cores/threads (is that correct?).

https://www.ebay.com/itm/HPE-Proliant-D ... 9PBbPJeZEQ

Just to clarify a few questions:
- Can I install Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop on this? I'm planning to do a USB install. If I understood this correctly, I can install ubuntu
(https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/do ... -c04438844).

- Is this kind of hardware appropriate for 100-150 cameras? It will only be running zoneminder and nothing else.

- Can I hook 2-3 screens up to this server to spread the view of all the cameras? i.e. have a multi-monitor computer. I want to be able to see everything at the same time. It looks like this has only one VGA port out for monitor connection. Can something different be added or am I not understanding correctly?
parky
Posts: 45
Joined: Sun Aug 28, 2011 8:41 am

Re: Hardware for 100-150 IP camera system?

Post by parky »

Ex corporate kit is great value for money and is super stable. Not sure if you could load a G9 to run that many cameras as you might meet a bottlekneck of disk throughput writing to the database if you are running it all on one box including a GUI front end

With ZM you don't need to share the server console as the ZM GUI does it all on any PC. If you want multiple consoles then a video splitter would do the job. Running Ubuntu server takes less CPU as you don't really need the heavyweight GUI if you are only running ZM

I would suspect that for such a heavy load running a dedicated DB server with multiple ZM servers fronting it would be your solution

I have DL380 G7 like I used to build at work and use it as a test rig. I have given it a pair of Procs and more memory and it has some punch. It runs Ubuntu 20 just fine with KVM for adding guests. It boots off a small array running on a P410 with the load for the bigger array taken by a P820
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iconnor
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Re: Hardware for 100-150 IP camera system?

Post by iconnor »

At 720p 4 camera per real core. At 1080p 2 cameras per core. Anything higher, it's going to get complicated.

Proper server hardware is great. Except: desktop systems have gpus and are designed for watching moviez. servers are not and don't. We are effectively watching many movies at once.

However they have the ram and io bandwidth that we need, and lots of cpu cores, so great.

Their fans tend to be loud, but sometimes we can tune that too.

I'm a big fan of used server hardware
DVB Hardware
Posts: 201
Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2015 5:12 pm
Location: Rhode Island

Re: Hardware for 100-150 IP camera system?

Post by DVB Hardware »

iconnor wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 2:47 am At 720p 4 camera per real core. At 1080p 2 cameras per core. Anything higher, it's going to get complicated.

I'm a big fan of used server hardware
And how about ram per camera ??
Linux Mint 21 Cinnamon Mariadb 10.6.x using Master 1.37.x latest always

DVB stands for Digital VIdeo Broadcasting , retired satellite downlink supplier
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