Looking for an NVR for large establishment

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Hello
I'm working on installing IP CCTV system in a hotel we have here, I usually use Synology for most of my installations just because the user/clint side of the GUI its beautiful it also have Android, IOS and Desktop applications with a very easy and beautiful GUI for your grandma average user.
But this is my first large scale installation

I need to install 35 POE IP camera with the ability to scale up to 100, maybe I can compromise at 75.
I want to view / record at 1080p with at least 24fps.

So I was looking at synology stuff with there NVR calculator
and I found few but they are kinda expensive, so I thought to look around for an NVR OS or Distor and Maybe I can build my own NVR, with better hardware and cost me less money.
I found https://zoneminder.com So I was planning on running it on top of a freenas on a VM and just to get ZFS and more redundancy.

But then I saw the GUI and the lack of android/IOS application and how its kinda unpolished from client side and I hit the brakes on this one, I don't think the end user will appreciate how much work I have done if his side is not "pretty enough" for him.

I also checked Unifi Solution and I love it but there is no unifi distributor in my county and I have to ship everything and that will probably cost me more than synology.

So I'm here asking for advice what do you think I should do? should I stick with Synology and just suck up the cost? or is there another solution out there i don't know about? or is there a way to make zoneminder better on client side ?

2
  1. No wireless cameras. Don't do it. Any headache you save not running the wire comes back 10 fold with flakiness of the setup.
  2. Don't skimp on the PoE switches. Cameras are in all sorts of weird places and will pick up a lot of EM during storms. You need a great PoE switch and maybe a ground panel if you have a lot of dead.
  3. zoneminder won't scale.

You might look at hikvision: http://www.hikvision.com/us/products_10531.html the software is multi-platform, and free. And they've been good about updating the firmware on their cameras. They have been stable and reliable and not needed a lot of reboots. The cameras can integrate with a legacy alarm system and for the truly paranoid, you can have "local" storage on the camera so even if a bad guy takes out your whatever, you can store a loop of video on an SD card in the camera (if you get one of those models)

for storage and processing, with hikvision, you don't need much. Each camera does its own processing and flags the mp4 stream. The mp4 based streams are extremely space efficient, especially if there is no movement. For an installation that large, you should order about 5 and do a test system.

You will probably need about two gigabits of backhaul to your storage server. I'd suggest segmenting your camera network into four collison domains and use a 4 port gigabit adapter into your storage server, one for each segment. Then you can scale however you need to. The costs won't be that much.

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