 Tom here from Orange Systems. And finally, after, well, a really long time, the UXG is out of beta, the UXG Pro, the new Unify routing switch. And I kind of wanted to talk about this because I don't really have a plan to do a full review, but I wanted to discuss this because of the number of comments and tags in Twitter and messages and forum posts, all saying, Hey, Tom, what do you think of this? And well, rather than me type it all out, I'm just going to do a video to share with what I think about the new release from ubiquity. Now, before we get into this video, are you an individual or company looking for support on a network engineering storage or virtualization project? Is your company or internal IT team looking for someone to proactively monitor your system security or offer strategic guidance to keep your IT systems operating smoothly? 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Now Riley manages as of the time he tweeted this, this is from Riley Chase from Hostify, approximately one in three locations connected to Hostify servers are using a unified gateway. Now by the way, just for a little clarification, if you're not completely familiar with the unified product line, if you were using a unified dream machine pro, it is not able to connect to the hostify system because unified dream machine pro and the unified dream machine series has a built in controller. That means you adopt the other devices, the controller, but in the business world, there's fewer people using these because if you have a larger deployment of a lot of devices, the controller within the unified controller. Well, it isn't quite robust enough to handle large number of sites. Many people do use hostify. Obviously, as Riley's breaking down here, 25,000 sites that he looked at are using the hostify service to host the unified controller. You don't have to use hostify. I do recommend using my offer code down below if you're interested in using it. I've had Riley on the channel talking about the product for a long time. We're really like the product. The other option, of course, you can absolutely host this controller and maintain it yourself and many of the businesses, us included, we do choose to maintain our own controllers, but we don't usually use that much of the unified routing equipment. This brought up the question of how much unified routing equipment is out there. Now, granted, we're using hostify as a sample. This is not going to be, you know, a market sample, but this is a market sample we do have data on as in first their customer of hostify. And it's really interesting to see all these unify gateway three, the USG threes, fours. And it's cool. He's got 28 pros on the network as of the time that this was tweeted, which was just a few days ago. So this is all done within March. But one of the things is if we started looking at this, and this is only recently been looked at when this discussion came up on a live stream, we would probably see some of the numbers dwindling because, well, the USG and that is an old product. And the Gateway Pro is a new product. It is very new, but it was also in the beta store, the pre-release preview store for a couple of years. Now, this has been exciting for a lot of people. And this is why I want to share my thoughts on this product and talk about, you know, is this the next line? Well, it's really just a beefed up version of their other Unify gateways. This is something I want to make sure it's very clear. Also, it's kind of weird. I mean, I assumed, and prior to a release of this, I didn't think it would come out of the beta store. I'll be completely say that Unify proved me wrong. They didn't release it, but I don't feel that Unify or Ubiquity as a company, I should say, Unify as their product line related to this, are really putting the effort forth in this market. I feel they do it because they know there's enough users that will buy it, so they will release it. And this is a $499 device. It does have 10 gig connectivity. So we got two LAN ports with 10 gig SFP plus and two LAN ports that have 10 gig SFP plus. What is kind of missing from here, and maybe, and I don't know if I'll buy one for testing in this, it doesn't give me a lot of information on just how fast it can actually route at or any of the routing details. This is obviously really important. I just didn't see it here. I didn't see it in the summary. It doesn't seem to have that information in here. I don't see these details. If you look at the instruction manuals or the datasheet, we can do the same thing. It gives us some pretty basic specs on it. But I'm not seeing within here, other than we got a quad core ARM Cortex at 1.7. But yeah, there's not anything in here to really give me some performance stats on here. And if you go to Unify's site, how they're marketing and advertising it is a little bit fuzzy because if I go to Unify OS Councils, well, it's not really an OS Council because it can't run the controller. So where does it fall on here? Here's the Dream Machine and USG Pro and USG. But not much mention of it. You know, there's just not... They have the Dream Machine in comparisons they can do here to the other products. But this one seems kind of absent from their listing. And I don't see it under switching. And it's not a switch either, by the way. So why would it be under switching? But, you know, unless I'm just not good enough to Google their site and find it, because all Google links always bring me back to their store itself, which shows it for sale. And this is the part I really wanted to cover with how their product line works with the USGs and somewhat with the Unify Dream Machines. We know, and I'm very aware of people who have extended the capability of these devices, the USG, the Unify Dream Machine, through different projects and modification of the firmware, kind of the off-book use of it. It's not something we support. It's something definitely among the hobbyist people, great. But they often run into the problem of this extra support comes at the cost of it breaking things when you have it attached to the dashboard. And if you're not going to attach it to the dashboard and you're going to pay $500 for a router, why not just buy something that's within that price range that has all the features you're trying to extend? The VPN service is the same because it's limited by the Unify software. So until the Unify software starts offering native WireGuard support, policy routing, policy routing for outbound VPNs and lots of granular details that you are just missing that are beyond the not capabilities because we know, as I mentioned in these extended projects people have where they modify the firmware, we know these things can be done with the device. It's just something that done in the software. So the release of this product is nice for people who just need a faster USG. But for those you're going, but Tom doesn't this one have and this is where the question comes up. And this is also from the consulting we do where I try to do my absolute best because there's no fun at all in talking to someone who contacts us for consulting on Unify by which we do a lot of and then we tell them you can't do the things you wanted to do. And it's almost a little strange to me people watch a policy routing and me talking about PF Sense and some of the things we do with their routers and then they go out and buy a different router such as something in the Unify because they like that full integration into the dashboard and they're hoping to get the same set of features. They're going, hey, I'd like a nice multi-user VPN set up on this using open VPN. And I'm like, sorry, that's not something built into the USG and it's not something natively built into the software. So this is not the solution for you. Now, this is not a me telling you not to buy the product. I'm trying to help educate buyers that does your use case require things that this doesn't do. It's really as simple as that from a deployment and reliability. We have lots of people we know using them. It's not something we actively deploy in our fleet but we've consulted enough people who go, you know what I need? Three VLANs and a little bit of routing set up. And I don't need VPN and I don't need policy routing. I don't need any of those advanced features. Well, awesome. It's a great fit for you. You may need the SFP plus ports that are on there and this is great. These, if your use case fits it and you don't plan to increase what your use case is. And if you look at a small office with some basic routing needs and maybe they have no applications on-prem everything they run is in the cloud. It's a common scenario for a lot of small businesses. There's not even a need to set up VPN to get back to their computers or there's alternative things. Obviously not running the VPN on the USG is a popular option. I've talked to people with that. They're like, we use different VPN tools such as I've mentioned zero tier. I've mentioned tail scale to get back directly to their workers that are on their desktops. So, you know, there are workarounds and solutions. And as long as you've planned out great and this product fits the use case for you I want everything in one dashboard. I want my UniFi switches and my UniFi access points and my routing equipment to be really easy. And when I create a VLAN I don't want to have to go into a firewall to do that. Hey, there's no matching the integration that UniFi products have with all the other UniFi product line. So in that case, yes, it's a good buy but this really comes down to your decision which one you want to do. I just wanted to do this video to throw it out there that the features available and it aren't that I can find it all and talking to people and without even owning one I don't see any reason why it would be any different than what the UniFi controller software offers now. Now, if they make a big change to the controller software that would be very interesting if they added this to the controller software as we've mentioned before people have extended the capabilities. So if you had a firmware update to enhance the capabilities of the existing devices or including this new device combined with these added features within the UniFi controller, that would be great. Now both you can actually have a device that you bought today that would be better tomorrow. Now that is a big promise in the software defined world that it gets better but it requires the company having a roadmap and making it better ultimately. And that's not where they're at today. And so if you're looking at a product you usually look at the features that are guaranteed the features that it will ship with today not the hope that it will eventually add those extended features unless the company has a roadmap and gives you a date and you feel confident that that date will be met. But then again, it's ultimately your decision. I prefer to buy the working product now if I have use cases that need it because that's the real world right now. That's my advice for the product. It's not a don't buy it. It's think about your needs align your needs to make sure it matches. That is all. I just don't want anyone to spend money they don't need on the wrong product that doesn't make the consumer happy. And it doesn't make people who complain about these products. Hey, I wish I would have known this ahead of time. I do everything I can to make sure people know ahead of time and put this information out there. Leave your question and comments down below or have a more in depth discussion in the forums. All right, thanks. And thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video. If you've enjoyed the content, please give us a thumbs up. If you would like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon. If you'd like to hire a short project head over to laurancesystems.com and click the hires button right at the top. 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