Surveillance System Design

[mrych]

I am looking to sell an 8 camera PVC2300 solution to a school that would like to record 24 hours a day continuously and retain data for 3-4 days.  Can someone recommend an INEXPENSIVE small business PoE switch and NAS device for storage?

[Eivind Jonassen]

Have you looked at SRW switches?? They have 12 PoE ports, that should work, or you could take a look at the new ESW switches. The network storage is NSS6600 i think, if I´m not completely mistaken you can´t use 4400 since the 6600 has to be "master storage". You can use the linksys backup software (maybe rebranded) for making backup to the NSS, maybe the NSS2000 has enough storage, it depends on how you set things up I guess..

Regards

Eivind

[mrych]

Sorry, maybe I should have clarified better... in terms of the switches... I've looked at the 8 port modes for both the SFE1000P and SRW2008P.  Both appear to deliver 15.4 Watts of power to 4 ports and 7.5Watts of power to 8 ports.  According to Cisco's specs on the PVC2300 cameras, they draw 10 Watts of power.  So... will either of these switches work?  15.4 X 4 = 61.6 Watts... 7.5 X 8 = 60 Watts... the camara are right in the middle of that load at 10 Watts.  If I need 6, will the switch deliver 10 Watts across 6 ports for a total of 60 Watts?  The total draw on the switch is the same but I don't know if that is how it funcitons or if the switch senses that more than 4 ports are in use so it will only pass 7.5 Watts to each port.  If the 8 port switch doesn't work it would appear that I would need a 24 port PoE switch as Cisco doesn't appear to offer a 16 port PoE model.

In terms of storage, I guess what I'm asking is how much total raw storage space is required to store data for 6 cameras recording 24 hours a day for 3-4 days?  Is there some sort of a chart that shows how much space will be required so that I know how large to size my storage device?

[Ivor Diedricks]

Both of the switches referenced below deliver a up to 15.4W of power on any port. It has a power budget that allows for max power (15.4W) on up to 4 ports simultaneously. The switch had a sum total power budget of (4x7.5W or 8x15.4W = 61.6W) for the purposes of PoE and that power can be distributed across all or a subset of the ports as needed. You may have two ports requiring 10W while all the rest of the ports require 5 W. That will work too. Your specific example of 6 ports at 10 W will work. Note that if you do need 15.4W on all ports, we do offer SRW2008MP as well.

Hope that helps.

[Eivind Jonassen]

This guide could be a good start ;

https://www.myciscocommunity.com/docs/DOC-2595

There´s been alot of updates to the firmware, name branding etc since this guide was published, but it gives you the basic concept of the system.

I do not know exactly how much storage you need, but you can setup the camera to use motion detection, so that you don´t record when nothing happens, it´s all explained in the guide above :)

Regards

Eivind