Is it practical to use iSCSI over VPN for security system?

[Anita Bath]

Hi, i am setting a security system for my office. I have 5 Axis M1103 IP cameras in our office and another one in office at Belarus. Server that runs AXIS camera is located in our building. I am going to setup the camera at out other office also to record footage there. I want to store all the recorded footage in our boss’s home. We have Cisco RV082 at our office. I am planning to have gateway to gateway VPN and then connect it to the Cisco RV042 which is at his home. We are planning to store this record on QNAP NAS capable of iSCSI. All the camera support H264 encoding, we have 5 megabit uploading speed. Will my server treat the QNAP NAS as normal hard drive for storing the videos ? How much overhead will iSCSI create if used with VPN protocols? Will jumbo frames reduce the overhead created by the iSCSI? Is there any better solution than this?

[Eeshwari3]

No you don’t need to use iSCSI for this purpose. If your boss wants all the footage recorded at his house then you can setup the video recording software on computer available at your boss’s home. You will eed to redirect all the cameras to this system. Having recording software at one place with storage at iSCSI and going to the different location will not make any sense.

[Anita Bath]

Are you saying that iSCSI can only be used for increasing the performance only and not for remote storage because speed of 5 megabit will limit the performance of the iSCSI? I was thinking that using iSCSI will come handy and much better for me then storing the recorded media to the network place folder.

[shetty]

iSCSI is a block layer protocol and thus operating system considers it as a hard disk. If its latency gets too high then your system may assume that it is having some sort of problems and can make it offline from network. The moment you suffer from any network problem, rerouting or rebooting any gateway you will lose the iSCSI and your disk also. You should go with something else that has better latency than iSCSI. You should record the videos at local drives only and then send it to remote machines via some other methods like SAN replication or DFS-R scripted uploads.

[Bjork]

IP cameras and the software that are used to record, depends on the better internet quality connection. You will have to just set the cameras pointing at other IP or DDNS addresses in the system which is at your boss’s home. Whenever any motion is detected by the camera it will stream the video or photos to the server system. You can’t record at one place and then send it to remote place as it will cause the problem, as sometimes for playing the video recorded by the camera needs a recording application and the databases. So this will only help if your are making backup of anything., because this requires syncing and duplicating of the database files to another location also.

[Kakashi Hatake]

If you see the user guide then you will realize that it looks like a DVR system which supports the exporting of video in DVD and file in specific format which needs a player. Reason for needing the proprietary player is that exported files have metadata such as name of camera, time stamps etc. this player also allows you to control the media that you are playing. If there are events at say 10:30 PM and 12:30 and if you want to know when this event occurred and for what time period at which time by which camera then you can get that information from this player.

[Dalajit]

If you are recording to the offsite then it may happen that somebody is taking out the internet access from you. If you are using the camera at night as well as for day time monitoring then you should keep track of all the videos or there is always the chance of losing the media. Thus you should keep your recorded media at on site in safe place with your DVR servers and cameras working on the properly powered UPS. You can then access the media using the properly supporting browser or you can also use the remote desktop tool to view this file.

[TABLITA]

I was inspecting axis m1011 camera and it looked pretty much small and yet good in performance. In my office i have 10 IP cameras and 15 analog cameras connected with core 2 Duo with 3 GB of the RAM using the Linux debian and zoneminder systems. I would never record for full time continuously. The Axis cameras have better motion detection. I have set it notify me on the TCP or send the file with FTP. It is better to have motion detector to record than having continuous record. It a;lso helps in fast forwarding with good speed.