 Tom here from Lauren systems. It is July of 2020. That is relevant because I'm gonna talk about a project. We did back in 2018 now, I'm not a clickbait person. So the project works and all that's wonderful. That's um, there you go Now you don't have to watch for it's a video or you could anyways We installed this project and I wanted to do a follow up because I think follow up is important because After you install almost 300 access points. Did they work? What does it look like? Is the client still happy or is the client hate you because you installed a product that doesn't work? Well, and he's had a million problems, etc, etc, and what does it look like? How does 2,000 users? Are they happy? Those are all important questions and we're gonna jump into them right after this feel like to learn more about me or my company Head over to Lawrence systems.com. 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Well randomly So check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video And other tech topics you've seen on this channel now back to our content Now we're gonna start here And I know a lot of people gonna be immediately disappointed the fact that I can't live show all their controllers screen shots Etc and the reason why is the same reason we can't film there. We do have permission to mention All this and I got permission to log into the dashboard and show this But this is how hosted all at the client the client can't be named because of compliance and their IT department loves us But they're people that sit in a C suite said, you know, we don't like talking about our hardware We don't like pictures. We don't like anyone mentioning our name and things That would make us happy if you never mentioned it and we said that's fine We actually deal with this quite a bit with clients They hire us for projects that they found us on YouTube, which is exactly how we got this job But they also then go back and say, you know, we'd like to not be mentioned because we don't like people knowing our any of Our infrastructure it makes our legal team nervous and we don't want to deal with it fair enough We're completely complying but I can't share that we have 304 devices 292 wireless wired 12 long-term support 9 now because we replaced a bunch of these unifies that were sold to them as hardware as a service and When we did the swap some didn't get swapped because they didn't the hardware as a service company that sold them This didn't want them back. So that's how we left a few in place So this was a complete swap and replace now a little quick background How we got this job was they were searching YouTube videos looking at the unified product line because they happen to have it But it was sold to them as hardware as a service If you're not familiar with that type of business model basically you pay forever for the hardware So as an IT company they come in and they charge you a monthly yearly contract fee to install everything And then you keep infinitely leasing it and they give you full service and support and blah blah blah for a fee But then they changed their internal IT team They got a new leader who's got a calculator and said it only takes six months to pay for the entire hardware as a service We can we've been paying this for years or a couple years because of the older AP equipment And in six months time is the return on investment of putting and swapping it and self-hosting and owning it all internally So that's how this project came to be and that's how we end up with a few of them That are long-term because they didn't swap them, but they still perfectly work fine Now they are using unify 48 port POE switches. So that's what's installed for there and then There are varying degrees so different IDF rooms and overall if you can't tell from this picture here. There's a technically 12 different rooms that these were installed in this goes across several buildings each building is multi-floor the backhaul between Each device is fiber. So they have fiber because of the distance of the buildings with a little, you know The standard little SFP fiber converter. So but how does it work and how the install go? So obviously like I said, we can't film there. So there's no photos or anything like that But because this was a swap in place from hardware as a service. We didn't have to replan their Wi-Fi network We just had to basically go in there and Swap and replace so they already had the ceiling mounts and things like that, but they were the really old Access points. They actually they were the old 2.4 gigahertz not even five So we installed the UAP HD So they decided that if they were gonna go with something wanted to go with something pretty solid with really, you know These support high density a much higher density than they actually needed But they said hey if we're gonna do all this and the ROI even with these ones was still that six months because we could have Went with a cheaper access point that saved a little bit more money But they said even at six months are able to sell it to the management And why not go if you're gonna go through the trouble replacing because obviously there's a reasonable labor cost in this Now the switch is the previous hardware as a service company had were not unified They had kind of a mixed match of different switches that they did want back So our project was to come in there Get the controller set up They didn't have an onsite controllers a hardware as a service company managed everything off-site They want to do internally manage it not pay license fees and pay us to do the labor because their team wasn't big enough to Knock out a running network because by the way Downtime had to be at a minimum this place operates essentially 24-7 so the swap and replace was kind of all done in parallel with the Other company stuff as we were swapping and replacing so it's kind of tricky to do it required a lot of coordination with my team But that project it went really well the client was really happy We actually accomplished this in all the three days We swapped out all the equipment all the infrastructure and got it all up and running all right What happened so out of and they actually the client themselves bought the hardware and we did we provided the design engineering and labor for this project and We did but they did have us buy the switches They wanted us to take care of that part and but they bought all of these which was actually the bigger ticket item buying 300 UAP HDs Out of the box one single UAP HD had failed like it just didn't work We plugged it in no lights no nothing just one one that was it are made it to unify and we've are made things in the past and No problem. They shipped it back to them at a later date But we didn't need all 300 that we purposely bought a couple extra case there was any issues And recently one had an issue next part is what did it look like? So this was December of 2018 what it looked like in July of 2020 have they survived firmware updates controller updates, etc A couple things that I'm going to talk about first one Here is a video that'll leave a link to an inscription below large unify installs How to tune the controller for a high number of devices? Important aspect is that you have the controller tuned for a high number of devices I made sure I had all the settings in there So that was an important first step second make sure you have enough RAM the only thing they've had to do is add more memory because at the Subsequent versions of the controller update and their internal IT team has been pretty good about keeping up to date In updating to new versions of the controller software the newer controller seems to use a little bit more memory than the previous one Once you have this number of devices They bumped it up recently the 16 gigs RAM and it solves some little quirkiness that they were experiencing with the dashboard But these the users are thrilled they work they haven't had any hang ups They haven't had any hiccups they've all well We haven't been out to even swap a single one every one of these is still working and as they should be I think this is important. I've seen people tell me that they've seen high failure rates I have not when it comes to the access points It is extremely rare and we've done quite a few projects with these access points We're not just these ones the whole lineup of access points Even some outdoor ones which I plan to do a follow-up on that we installed like four years ago that are still outside and Are still working perfectly fine and don't have any issues So the overall no problems on a access points. What about the switches? The only problem we've run into the switches is we had one SFP module go bad and it wasn't on the switch It was the module itself for the fiber connector We had to swap it. It just was flaky It would randomly maybe once a week just decide to down the switch and But restarting the switch would do it We weren't sure where the problem was and we've tracked it down to being that was like first We thought it may be a slip bad switch, but turned out doesn't so all the switches still installed still where they are from December of 2018 to July of 2020 all working fine and as you've seen from the screenshot over here Some of these switches have quite a few access points plugged into them now We did get them the larger a higher wattage 48 port switch, which is important because you want to make sure that you always want to overspec rather than under spec when you have these on there but The whole project as a as I'm doing this follow-up like I said has not had issues I just want to you know drill this home a little bit because it seems like a lot of people mentioned what it won't work and One of the projects we did at the beginning of the year that I had Brought up was this one I can leave a link to this project installing 52 unified wireless access points for a warehouse And there's a lot of people that says oh, I've had so many failures it doesn't work at et cetera et cetera problems haters haters all caps on and That's fine. I don't know necessarily if these YouTube commenters are really people who installed unify or didn't do any RTFM and just threw it up there and didn't actually tune it and see if it worked now I will mention they do have just cause someone's gonna ask it is a head ended by a XG 7100 Which is a neck gate PF sense box is the head end of this particular network We did not go with the unify for the head end of the network when in terms of firewall router I've got a video where I talked about some of the shortcomings and one of them is the fact that they do have a block of IP addresses Lots of port for there's a lot of rules that are in place for VPN and part of the network access and a lot of complexities They have for the remote access the PF sense handles that perfectly fine I will be doing some follow-up videos on an outdoor project and one on this Project here because not only this project that I Published on February of 2020 this project went so well for the client This was actually the first one we did for them. They were so happy with this one We did several more. We've done a number of buildings. We're working on a few more buildings for them Unfortunately, that was the only one I can film and the other buildings are actively in use and well They prefer if I probably didn't film there and wandered around which is too bad So we've been pretty cool to do But either way that project works pretty well and so do the other ones But these are important to me that we do some of these follow-ups because you know you want to know What does it look like so many some period of time later is the client happy and their IT team? I asked permission they let me take these screenshots and they said Tom We're happy with it We you know we'd like to see you get more business even though you can't use our name in it because well You know people in the C-suite said we don't like talking about things publicly or having your name Tied to some YouTube guy even though they admit that's also how they found us was on YouTube, but hey, I'm cool with that so that's my story and There you go. Hopefully that's helpful to you if you want to know a little bit more about the longevity of the unified ecosystem We're happy with it And this is why we continue to sell it and are continuing to do project after project with these devices The access points and switches by them to me are just they nailed it They do a great job for the use cases that we have in here Thanks, and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video Please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon If you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to Lawrence systems calm fill out Our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on If you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com Or we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos They're accepted right there on our forums, which are free Also, if you like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page We have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again, thanks for watching and see you next time