Did You Know? – You should always install NVRs at the bottom and encoders at the top?

When installing product in a server rack you should always install NVRs at the bottom and encoders at the top?

Why? – Because with this configuration the heat generated by the encoders rises away from the NVR hard drives, allowing them to run cooler. Cooler disks are happy disks with a longer mean time between failures.

The adjacent picture of the equipment room at the Emerald Queen Casino. The system consists of 650 encoders running 4CIF at 30fps, with seven Windows NVRs each with 14TB of storage (direct attached SATA) from Winchester Data Systems. The system was installed in late 2007 and has grown to over 1000 cameras today.

It has fully redundant recording, networks and power supplies so a worst case failure will lose 1 encoder, which can be hot swapped.

Obviously the same principal applies regardless of the type of NVR you are using, IndigoVision, or Windows.

With the new NVR-AS3000, storage would be best done with 5x 3TB RAID5 sNVR per rack to reduce running costs, redundancy size and eliminate servers.

Advantages:
Reduced power consumption from a typical 40 watts/TB to 9 watts/TB. So for each WinNVR (14TB) replaced, we reduce the power by 434 watts.
That’s a 1480 BTU reduction in cooling requirements, which means another ~400 watts power saving.
With 7 identical servers, we can save over 1 year 88971Kwh or $15,000 less power.

Increased redundancy by replacing a 6 to 1 WinNVR fail over redundancy with a 30 to 10 sNVR redundancy.
With the WinNVR, only 1 server could be off line at any one time as there is only 1 backup. If a second server should fail, 120 cameras will stop recording.
With the sNVR, we can afford for 5 NVR’s to fail at the same time without losing any recordings. Being no Windows based, the reliability is also higher.

Disadvantages:

An increase in rack space by 4RU per cabinet.