Selecting hardware for video surveillance¶

When planning to install a video surveillance system at a secured facility or as a service for your subscribers, you will inevitably face the need to select servers or choose a plan on a cloud platform so that there were enough capacity to provide the required performance. You will have to understand what channel bandwidth you need, how much disk space, which CPU, how much video memory, etc. All these characteristics can be easily calculated if you know the number of cameras and the quality of the video coming from them, the number of subscribers/users, as well as the types of analytics that you plan to use.

You will find minimum hardware requirements on the System requirements for Watcher page. When using video analytics (face recognition and/or LPR), the requirements are slightly increased as described here. You can calculate the hardware characteristics for your case or run the load tests.

You will find the following guidelines in the sections below:

• Minimum system requirements
• Calculation of the bandwidth and disks for storing the video archive
• CPU selection
• Calculation of resources for analytics