Performance
IOPS to the database drive plays an important part in determining the number of feeds, or the amount of bandwidth, to the server.
- To maximize the retention time space available, compared to redundancy, the 18 disks are configured to RAID 6.
- We achieved approximately a 33 percent increase in performance between the SATA 7.2K disks, and SAS 7.2K disks in the same configuration.
- If a higher performance is required on the database, RAID 10 can be implemented.
- Using SSD as a live volume step to archiving gives you the appropriate performance required during the archiving process.
- The Read IOPS quantity is roughly 10 times the Write IOPS size from the Live Database during an archive operation.
- Remember to size the archive volume with an appropriate speed to accept the higher IOPS. Testing with RAID 6 as a landing zone for archiving gave us no improvement on the incoming bandwidth. Changing to RAID 10 gave us the bandwidth required on the archive volume. SSD disks can also be considered if higher performance is required.
- On all tests, we used 10G networking for the video network.
- A key benefit observed during tests of using a relatively small Live Volume, on fast disks, is the recovery of the platform to recording from a hard power down. The recorder server took less than one minute to start recording again, while repairing the archive database in the background, compared to more than 20 minutes on the server with a single Live Database of 117 TB.
Disks
- SATA disks: Useful for the higher retention time.
- SAS 7.2K disks: Will increase the performance while retaining the same retention time.
- SSD: Ideal for a Live Database small volume, archiving to higher density disks.
GPU support
The R740XD natively supports the NVIDIA P4 GPU, scaling to a maximum of six adapters in the R740 model. The BIOS support of the adapter ensures appropriate power and cooling is provided to the adapter.
Milestone primarily uses the Decoder chip on the adapter. Also, the level of CUDA and memory leverage with the P4 adapters is approximately 10 percent with motion detection enabled. Analytics applications on the same server can use the extra bandwidth.
- Pascal-based adapters are required to support the decoding of H.264 and H.265 feeds.
- The load on the Decoder chip is balanced as you scale the quantity of adapters in the platform.
- Adding the GPU adapter increases the overall platform performance, in our case by 37 percent in the dual GPU configuration, while decreasing the CPU load by approximately 50 percent.
Milestone application recommendations
Dell EMC recommends the following configuration for the Milestone application:
- Use 200 cameras for each recording server instance (to a maximum of 300)
- Install a full SQL Server (standard or enterprise) edition when using more than 300 cameras in a system
- When creating various recording server instances, you must give each instance a valid IPv4 and IPv6 (IPv6 cannot be looped with ::1)