Recording DVR Archive on NAS NFS¶

Deploying virtualized corporate environments often involves the use of network storage as a reliable way to save a virtual machine image and run it on another server. In this setup, a single network storage can be connected to dozens or even hundreds of virtual machines.

This means that network storage is used in configurations where the computing power is significantly greater than the data, and the traffic from each computing node is relatively small.

Sometimes, this experience is attempted to be applied to video archive storage, raising the question: how to use network storage in video surveillance or television tasks.

The simple answer is: not at all. It is economically and technically unjustifiable, leading to enormous cost overruns and guaranteed issues with recording stability over NFS.

Network storage is essentially a server with specialized software for storage and arbitrary recording. Often, the size of the network storage is smaller than the space on a server with 36 disks assembled for video surveillance.

As a result, you are simply buying two servers, connecting them over a network, and copying from one to the other. No consolidation effect is achieved by connecting 10 video servers to one storage.

Storage Backup¶

Network storage typically uses some form of RAID with protection against one or two disk failures. Network storage resilient to the failure of an entire server is very rare.

If you need reliable archive storage, it is better not to rely on a single point of failure, but rather build a redundant cluster.

How to Connect Storage, If You Really Want To?¶

Network storage is usually mounted via the NFS protocol. Flussonic does not have built-in NFS client support, instead, it is expected to use the standard Linux client.

You should be aware that if any packets in the NFS traffic are lost, the streamer itself can freeze and become unresponsive indefinitely, requiring a server reboot due to NFS implementation specifics in the kernel.

Options like soft, intr, timeo, retrans can help. For more detailed explanations, refer to the operating system manuals: man nfs.