Help and advice please

[woodsp]

Hello,

We have a dispersed environment of 10 data centres spread around quite a large County - some sites are more than 40 miles from our main site, but I want to be able to view all data centres and the isles within them - so we may want up to 3 cameras per data centre linking back to a central set of screens/software at our main site.
The data centres are linked by 100MBit IP based comms lines.
Our aim is to use the cameras to ensure that health and safety is being observed.

I would welcome your suggestions as to what kit we should be using.

Thanks,
Paul

 

[Phil]

IP cameras for server rooms

Hi Paul,

Thanks for getting in touch.

I would suggest that the ACTi ACM-4200 cube camera would be a good model to consider. It's a 1.3 Megapixel network camera.

If you'd prefer to deploy your cameras by utilising power over ethernet, then the ACTi ACM-4201 version is POE enabled.

The next step up being the ACTi TCM-4301 which has the further addition of h.264 video compression built-in for the most efficient use of bandwidth and storage.

If you'd prefer dome cameras, you might like to consider the ACTi ACM-3411 megapixel dome camera, which is also POE-enabled.

If you'd like to be able to see when the lights go out, then the ACTi ACM-3511 megapixel dome camera has built-in infra-red LEDs and POE.

There are also lower cost network camera models delivering 640x480 resolution.

Of course, you can mix & match any of the above at any site.

There's lots more information (including video clips from the suggested cameras) on the product pages.

I've proposed These ACTi models as you will also be able to take advantage of their free network video recorder (NVR) software, their NVR Enterprise version will enable you to manage multiple sites, with up to 16 cameras at each site, free-of-charge.

Or, if you'd prefer to record the cameras all at one PC/server on the network, then their NVR Professional software will allow you to record up to 64 cameras free-of-charge.

Hope that helps ...

 

[sonic]

Hi Paul

We are doing something very similar with 22 IP cameras on 9 sites spread UK wide, and plan to roll out the solution to further sites

We use a mixture of Axis and ACTi cameras with Logiware Go1984 Enterprise NVR servers at 2 sites for monitoring & recording. Good recommendations from Phil above - IMO the ACTi cameras offer outstanding value.

Our IP-CCTV system does hammer quite a lot of WAN bandwidth (up to 110Mbps on one link) but that's not a big problem for us as we are a Telcoms operator with a Multiple-Gig network!

A few things I would suggest to bear in mind:

1) For clarity it's best not to over compress or reduce camera resolution but you can reduce the frame rate on each IP camera to reduce network utilisation - 5fps is plenty for most CCTV applications, but even 1-2fps may be sufficient for your H&S purposes

2) Low camera count NVRs can be built for next to nothing using free or low-cost software and a spare desktop PC. So if WAN bandwidth is a problem you could put an NVR in each site for best quality local recording, but live-view the NVRs centrally with reduced quality (via NVR client or web interface) to limit WAN utilisation.

3) Some camera manufacturers offer free NVR software but this usually only works with their own IP cameras - if you want to mix cameras from different vendors you will need to pay for an NVR solution that supports multiple vendor hardware. I'd strongly recommend Go1984 (you can download & try it out for free) but there are other recommendations in the NVR threads.

Good luck & if you have any more questions please feel free to PM me!

Sonic