Video Surveillance Storage & Bandwidth Sizing: Cameras, Bitrates, Motion Recording, Retention Days, Disks & Network Load

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Build the camera list of a fictional freight depot, look up a typical bitrate for every resolution, scale it to the frame rate each camera actually uses and add up the stream that reaches the recorder.
• Apply fictional codec factors, raise the bitrate for noisy night scenes, blend day and night into a 24-hour average and find both the peak and the average stream of the whole site.
• Turn each camera's recording mode into hours recorded per day, including schedules that run past midnight, convert Mbit/s into gigabytes per day and measure how much the modes save against continuous recording.
• Multiply cameras, GB per day and retention days into the storage each group needs, add up the site in TB, convert it to TiB and add headroom so the disks never run completely full.
• Work out how many disks of each size a fictional redundancy layout needs for the required capacity, how much of it is usable, what a usable terabyte costs and how a mirrored layout compares.
• Add up the peak camera streams per switch with protocol overhead, compare them with each uplink's speed, flag overloaded links and check whether the internet upload can carry the remote viewers.
• Price a fictional cloud plan per camera and retention period, add up a local recorder's purchase, power and maintenance over five years and compare both as a cost per camera per month.
• Combine bitrate, recorded share and retention into the storage per site, add the fill-level headroom, test a longer retention for all sites and chart the result for the client.