Hi guys,
I want to record live meeting that gets streamed from pexip to WSE. What is the required server specs and hard-drive to store 720 HD for about 4 hours a day for 30 days and for about 100 concurrent meetings.
Thanks & Regards,
Hasan.
Hello @Mohamed_Hasan_Adnan great question!
For that kind of sizing request and stuff being specific, we usually suggest you speak to Wowza ProServe for an architecture overview, but you might be a better candidate for Wowza Video than Streaming Engine because 100 concurrent meetings all recording ~4hours isn’t going to be one machine or server I suspect.
Do you have any recommendations @Karel_Boek? I know you specialize in load balancing at your company.
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You can calculate the required disk size; if you know the bitrate. Because “720p” says something about the resolution but not about the bitrate. Let’s assume you use 2Mbps; then:
2 Mbps = 7200 Mbit per hour
7200 Mbit = 900 MB (from bits to byte = divide by 8)*
4 hours = 3.6GB (that’s how much storage space you would need to record 1 stream for 4 hours)
So 100 streams = 360GB of storage per day, and thus 10,800GB (10.8TB) per 30 days.
I assume you can do the math with your actual stream bitrate.
That’s for the storage; now for the throughput
If you stick with the example of 2Mbps, and you have 100 concurrent meetings, then your total bandwidth requirement is 200Mbps. Most servers (if not all) nowadays have 10Gbps or at least 1Gbps, so that should be fine.
Can you store 100 x 2Mbps concurrently? Your disk throughput, typically measured in IOPS, depends on the block size of your disk volume. There are some websites that help you convert the numbers, e.g. https://wintelguy.com/iops-mbs-gbday-calc.pl or https://editorsean.com/articles/convert-mbps-iops/. With a block size of 64k, and 100 concurrent streams at 2Mbps, you will need an IOPS of roughly 3051. Unless you use SSD, you’ll need like 15K SAS disks in a RAID-10 configuration.
If you use AWS EC2, you can actually see the IOPS when you create an instance (choose Advanced when configuring the disk volume)
Is it smart to run 100 concurrent streams in Wowza?
Good question. I would not do it; simply because you have a huge SPOF there. I’d divide it over 2-3 servers so you have fail-over. It takes the pressure of your IOPS as well.
With AWS; you could use EBS volumes that you connect to all Wowza Servers and set up recording to continue where it left off on all Wowza Servers; then if you have to switch your stream to a different server, presumed that you use the same stream name, recording will continue. Then after the event, you copy the recording to S3 (there’s a free Wowza plug-in for that), and that saves you quite some cost. For playback you use the MediaCache setup in Wowza (built-in support for S3) and you’re good to go.
*) Fun fact: the word “byte” is derived from “by-eight”, because there’s 8 bits in a byte"
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Thanks a lot @Karel_Boek … This requirement is for one of the government sectors in Thailand and they dont want to use public cloud at all. So we have to do it all within their datacenters.
Very informative indeed!.
Thanks a lot @Rose_Power-Wowza_Com We are looking to have it clustered and load balanced across several instances and sites…
Will get in touch with you if there is any help required there.
Thanks & Regards,
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Ok great! You can reach out to sales@wowza.com to get a free consultation with a sales engineer. They’ll ask you more questions about your workflow and how you would use Streaming Engine- and then calculate the best license package to distribute it amongst a few servers. No obligation, just advice from an engineer expert.
Wowza Video is not an option obviously based on your security needs.