Hardware

ForensiQ is available as a standalone deployment on specific hardware configurations depending on the size of your setup - read below to learn more about how to use the calculator.

Requirements

Calculator

How to use the Hardware Calculator

1. Select the number of GPU models you want to use in your deployment, then choose the RAID configuration for your storage drives.

   • Parallel Historical Queries: This option allows you to specify the number of concurrent Free text and Advanced searches that can be executed on the system, across all users. Increasing this value may require additional hardware resources, such as RAM and storage space.

2. Configure Site and Channel Groups - a single Site Group and a single Channel Group are created by default.

   • A Site Group represents a logical grouping of cameras that share the same hardware resources. You can create multiple Site Groups to represent different locations or departments within your organization. A Site Group may contain multiple Channel Groups.

   • Channel Groups represent a logical grouping of cameras that share the same configuration settings. You can create multiple Channel Groups within a Site Group to represent different cameras configurations.

   • Increase the Replication value to duplicate a Site Group and its associated Channel Groups. This is useful for scaling your deployment across multiple locations with similar hardware requirements.

3. Review the results on the right side of the calculator, and adjust your configuration as needed.

Hardware Requirements

The following are the minimum hardware requirements for deploying ForensiQ:

Component	Minimum Requirement
Motherboard	Professional or enterprise-grade motherboard.
CPU	Server-grade x86-64 CPU released in the last 6 years.
GPU	Nvidia GPU of Turing architecture or newer - see the Calculator for options.
RAM	DDR4 or newer.
HDD	Server-grade HDD capable of continuous runtime - verify hard drives with CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) technology before purchase to ensure reliable video recording performance. Avoid hard drives using SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology, which can cause system instability. Do not use standard desktop or laptop hard drives for video storage, as they cannot handle constant recording and may fail during critical moments.
SSD	Professional/enterprise/NAS-grade SSDs.
File system	ZFS for the stored videos. A separate log device (SLOG) on an SSD is strongly recommended. See Video storage file system.

Only configurations meeting the minimum requirements are supported.

Video storage file system

The parent directory for stored videos, set during installation (default: /var/lib/forensiq), must reside on a ZFS dataset.

Separate log device (SLOG)

A separate log device on an SSD is strongly recommended.

Property	Requirement
Device	A dedicated SSD partition or a whole SSD. A partition of the operating system SSD is acceptable. File-backed log devices are not supported.
Size	16 GB recommended.
SSD grade	Professional/enterprise-grade SSD, preferably with power-loss protection.

Memory

Limit the ZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC) so that it does not compete with the services for memory. The recommended limit is 4 GiB.

Pool and dataset properties

Property	Value
atime	off
xattr	sa
sync	standard (default). Do not set sync=disabled, as data that has already been acknowledged could be lost on a power failure.