New services and hardware: Ubiquiti spruces up for enterprise customers
Network equipment supplier Ubiquiti has discovered a target group of enterprise customers and is polishing up its offering, including support for major projects
Ubiquitis neue All-in-One-Appliance Dream Machine Max Pro.
(Image: Ubiquiti)
- Benjamin Pfister
The network manufacturer Ubiquiti is extending its feelers towards enterprise customers. At the Ubiquiti Unifi World conference in Munich and the Mobility Field Day, the manufacturer known for its WLAN products in the SOHO market presented its enterprise strategy. In addition to more powerful products and 24/7 support, there will also be project support for large projects, prioritized hardware replacement and a channel partner program.
At the eleventh Mobility Field Day, the manufacturer announced its new strategy alongside various product announcements. The existing products are very popular in many network environments due to their competitive price-performance ratio. However, enterprise customers have so far lacked suitable support, which has meant that established manufacturers have been the preferred choice for some larger projects.
Three service pillars
The manufacturer divides its so-called "Professional Services" into three pillars: Expert Pre-Sales, Professional Telephone Support and UI Care. Under Expert Pre-Sales, the manufacturer wants to offer support for large projects by Unifi solution architects. In the area of telephone support, 24-hour support is to be offered.
Support will also be available in the EU, the company explained, at the request of the iX editorial team. There will also be a personal support contact. Ubiquiti's UI Care pillar includes a prioritized replacement process for defective hardware, free returns and unlimited 5-year service. There will also be a channel partner program.
All-in-one appliance for over 2000 clients
There are also some innovations in the area of hardware. The manufacturer has released the Dream Machine Pro Max all-in-one appliance for network management, firewalling and routing under the brand name Dream Machine. It is said to be able to manage up to 200 Unifi devices and more than 2,000 clients and deliver 5 Gbit/s throughput in combination with an integrated intrusion prevention system in addition to stateful firewalling. It also comes with one SFP+ slot each in the LAN and WAN, as well as 8*1 Gbit/s RJ45 ports in the LAN and 1*2.5 Gbit/s RJ45 as a WAN port. Ubiquiti also provides a touchscreen for a quick view of the device status.
An Enterprise Fortress Gateway that can handle 500 Unifi devices (switches and WLAN APs) and 5,000 simultaneous clients will also be released shortly. The IPS throughput should be 12 Gbit/s. On the WAN side, an SFP28 slot should deliver up to 25 Gbit/s or 2.5 Gbit/s via the RJ45 copper port. On the LAN side, the manufacturer is also planning an SFP28 slot (25 Gbit/s) and an additional 2*SFP+ slots (10 Gbit/s) and an RJ45 copper port with up to 2.5 Gbit/s. The appliance is also said to have hot-swappable power supplies.
According to the presentation, the appliance will also receive sandboxing and TLS decryption on the software side. The new BGP and OSPF support, as well as SD-WAN, policy routing, VRRP and QoS should make the product fit for enterprise use. In the WLAN environment, Ubiquiti is launching a new WiFi 7 access point called U7 Pro Max with eight spatial streams and 2.5 Gbit/s uplink, as well as a dedicated antenna for spectrum analysis.
(mack)