Official WLANmall Blog

1. Decide the number of cameras you need for your installation
2. Choose the codec or combination of codecs, frame rate, resolution and the estimated recording time for each camera.
   • Codecs: MJPEG, MPEG4, MXPEG, H.264
   • Frame rate: Up to 30 fps. From experience you will see that 4-6 frames per second will be sufficient in most security applications.
   • Resolution: CIF (320×280), 4CIF (640×480), 1.3MP (1280×1024), 2MP (1600×1200), 3.1MP (2048×1536), 5MP (2560×1920)
3. Use calculators to estimate amount of storage and server requirements.
   • MJPEG Storage Calculator
   • MPEG4 Storage Calculator
   • Server estimator
   • Lens Calculator
4. Order your server and configure the server according to calculated specifications. Below you will find some best practices. Please refer to the image below while reading this section.
   • Live database should be written to fast reliable SCSI or SAS hard drives.
   • Create a RAID1 logical drive using 2 physical SCSI or SAS disks. Then…
     • Carve out a 20GB or so partition for the operating system (C: drive) and then partition the rest for the live database (D: drive).
     • Depending on the number of cameras in your system you may not have enough capacity for the entire live database on the D: drive so extra disks will be required. These extra disks should be configured as individual RAID0 virtual disks in your RAID controller.
       • The RAID0 is important because it speeds up the write time which is critical in IP video where data is constantly being written to the media.



5. Setup physical archive storage. Your archive storage should be protected from loss so a RAID5 configuration is a good choice. In a small system you can use internal disks but in larger systems you will need either an external disk array, a NAS or a SAN. (see the figure above)
6. Install Milestone on C: drive
7. Through the Admin, install the DLKs provided to you by your Milestone Certified Partnerand add all the cameras to XProtect.
8. Set up camera parameters. With the recording server stopped go through each and every cameras configuration and recording, event and motion attributes. Be sure to set each camera’s live database directory to the appropriate disk. Please refer to step 4 and the image below.



9. Set up camera archive parameters. Go through and set up each cameras archive schedule and directory.



10. In the Image Server Administrator, set up users (basic or active directory) and give them access to view specific cameras on the Milestone XProtect system.

That’s it!