We installed a ReadyNas RR4312X with 12x 6TB Seagate SkyHawk Surveillance drives in RAID-50 for Avigilon security camera storage. We started out with 55 cameras and it worked flawlessly but as we are now approcahing 110 cameras it is starting to become sluggish and have issues reading data simultaneous to writing it. It is not a bandwidth issue as we have one of the 10Gb links dedicated to incomming traffic and the other 10Gb to outgoing. Respectively they are only showing 750MBps into the unit and 400MBps out. I am leaning towards this being a disk I/O issue however each drive has a data transfer rate of 600MBps and an internal rate of 195MBps. So the question is am I on the correct path of troubleshooting or should I be looking at a configuration issue? All ideas are appreciated. Thanks,Mike

Doblerm wrote: Respectively they are only showing 750MBps into the unit and 400MBps out. I am wondering what the needed peak write throughput is, and also the amount of data being collected per day. Using multiple volumes might help, as seeks would be independent. If you are writing to shares (as opposed to LUNs) then using SSDs for metadata tiering and possibly data caching might also help. Either approach would require using bigger physical disks to keep the same capacity. You might also look at the CPU load in the performance graphics. RAID-10 would likely reduce the CPU load, since no parity computations would need to be done. It would also reduce the amount of disk I/O needed for writes.

Thanks for the fast reply StephenB , We are a school so the money simply isnt there for SSD drives. Currently we are maxing out the storage with the desired retension rate so changing to RAID 10 would further limit retension unless like you stated we went to larger drives. I didn't see a CPU performance section. Unfortunately we have been closed for the last 5 weeks (spring break and COVID-19) so the 30-day chart is not represenative of average usage and I am unable to pull specific numbers.

Doblerm wrote: I didn't see a CPU performance section. Unfortunately we have been closed for the last 5 weeks (spring break and COVID-19) so the 30-day chart is not represenative of average usage and I am unable to pull specific numbers. Do you have ssh access remotely? If you do, then you can just run top.

The NAS is just storage, not running the surveillance app itself, correct? With 16GB of RAM standard, I'd think that was enough, but you could try adding more. While it would require completely re-configuring the NAS, I wonder if it would help to have multiple volumes and the cameras spread out as to on which each puts it's data. Are the cameras motion triggered, which means the demand fluctuates a lot, or continuous? If motion triggerred, have you noticed the problem worse during class changes when a lot are going to trigger at a time? Of course, modern codecs used by most security software compress unchanging data much smaller than changing data. So even if continuous monitoring is used, the data volume may increase with lots of motion all over campus.

The NAS is just the storage location and the application itself runs on another server. All cameras are set to record on motion. Time with many cameras recording on motion seems to make things a bit more sluggish.The way that Avigilon writes to its storage is by populating the entire drive (as seen by Windows) with folders that it randomly writes to. I am unable to define which cameras write to which drives. To create multiple volumes would decrease the usable storage availabe and decrease retension.

ReadyNas 4312x surveillance video storage issue

12 Replies

StephenB
Guru
Apr 22, 2020
Doblerm wrote:

Respectively they are only showing 750MBps into the unit and 400MBps out.

I am wondering what the needed peak write throughput is, and also the amount of data being collected per day.

Using multiple volumes might help, as seeks would be independent. If you are writing to shares (as opposed to LUNs) then using SSDs for metadata tiering and possibly data caching might also help. Either approach would require using bigger physical disks to keep the same capacity.

You might also look at the CPU load in the performance graphics. RAID-10 would likely reduce the CPU load, since no parity computations would need to be done. It would also reduce the amount of disk I/O needed for writes.
- Doblerm
  Aspirant
  Apr 22, 2020
  Thanks for the fast reply StephenB ,
  
  We are a school so the money simply isnt there for SSD drives. Currently we are maxing out the storage with the desired retension rate so changing to RAID 10 would further limit retension unless like you stated we went to larger drives.
  
  I didn't see a CPU performance section. Unfortunately we have been closed for the last 5 weeks (spring break and COVID-19) so the 30-day chart is not represenative of average usage and I am unable to pull specific numbers.
  - StephenB
    Guru
    Apr 22, 2020
    Doblerm wrote:
    
    I didn't see a CPU performance section. Unfortunately we have been closed for the last 5 weeks (spring break and COVID-19) so the 30-day chart is not represenative of average usage and I am unable to pull specific numbers.
    
    Do you have ssh access remotely? If you do, then you can just run top.

Forum Discussion

ReadyNas 4312x surveillance video storage issue

12 Replies

Related Content

More storage

ReadyNas Surveillance: App Download

ReadyNAS Surveillance on ReadyNAS 104

ReadyNas Nv+ 2, How to useMax storage.

ReadyNAS Surveillance

NETGEAR Academy

ProSupport for Business