 So I have a few Unify switches here to review. This is the Unify 24 on top and 48 at the bottom, named the Unify 24 and 48, but technically the 24 is a 26 port model because we have a couple SFPs and the 48 has 52 ports because we have two SFP module ports and two SFP plus module ports on it. So, let's talk about first what comes in a box. I unboxed them in the unboxing. It's not as cool as like an iPhone or anything, so I didn't bother like the whole removal process. If you're into that, I'm sure someone's done that. Power cords in here for each of them. This is the same parts in each of these. Heavy power cord, not one of those two flimsy ones. That's good. The rack ears. I like the rack ears on this. They're not chintzy. They are actually pretty thick. I've seen some of them have almost like paper thin rack ears and these also are like double enforced on the rolled edge here. Also, not sharp. Not going to cut yourself on them. So, good day. Do a nice job on that. Bolts to hold the rack ears. Or, I'm sorry, screws to hold the rack ears and rack nuts to mount in the rack. Your standard rack nuts with the screws. Nice that they include those in the box. And then the unit itself. Now, these are actually fairly substantial. There are metal, complete metal construction top and bottom. So, it's nice when you see how well made these are. Now, the 48 port one. A little bit more in depth. So, it's a little bit longer. So, take that into consideration if you're mounting this in a rack. Make sure the rack has enough depth to handle a 48 port model of this. All they have the measurements and specs on the site. So, let's take a little bit closer look at these before we get into the software. Move things out of the way here. So, I have removed those two screws from the back and two screws from the bottom. And then it just slides apart. So, let's go ahead and open this thing up. Make sure I got to take out the SFP. They keep a little rubber dust covers on them, which is nice. Get those out and let's pop this thing open. Let's avoid a warranty. The good news is, if I'm avoiding a warranty, it's not showing that I'm avoiding a warranty. Because they don't have any stickers that I could find at all to stop me from doing this. Or, I shouldn't say stop me. Discourage me from doing this because I'm gonna do it anyways. Because I want to know what's inside these unifies. So, let's... a little pry, a little pry there. It slides this way out. So, get a little bit of... there we go. And she's open. I open it upside down, I guess. So, flip it over. Because it slides a little forward like this and then probably up. You're learning as I'm learning. No editing here. There we go. This is really heavy. Kind of cool. So, you have the unify here in the front and we got some glue around there holding that in. We're gonna look at that. But this is... tap this real quick. Solid piece of metal. Not sharp. I can hold it like this. I'm not worried about cutting myself. And very heavy. Now, let's take a deeper look inside. Power supply, ports, but a lot of empty space. Tiny, tiny fan. Interesting. There's no feedback on the fan. It's not a three-way fan. So, I'll move the camera down closer so we can kind of dig into this a little bit. But this is nice and clean inside. There's not a mess in here at all. All right. So, here's a little bit closer look of what's inside. We see the power supply board over here. Pretty small, compact, clean. And I like that. It doesn't look like a bunch of crap everywhere. Some of these you'll see a lot of different wires. Here's our wires for the LED for the front. Pretty tiny LEDs on there. When we have the different chips for each one of them. So, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, times two. So, 12 of them. So, each two of these control that port. Pretty good size heat sink here and a good size heat sink here for the processor on these. And this is some of the genius of the way they design unify equipment is it all runs with a Linux kernel inside of it. There are cameras, there are Wi-Fi devices, and there are switches. So, you can terminal into these. When we get into the software part, I'll be talking about that. So, let's take a little closer look at the chips on here. Now, it's upside down, but these are some G48209SNG. And I actually googled them and I found a place to selling them, but not a lot of information on the chip itself. But everything's well put together. The board itself, and if you can read this down here. This is a, you know, got the ubiquity stamp on there. I like the way they do this, you know, so I can identify this board. It's got their mark on it. And it's really, it's a nice design. And like I said, the bottom's metal. I think the fan here is a little bit tiny, but they know what they're doing. And we let these run all day. They get pretty warm, but not like you're gonna get burned. So, they definitely do push some heat. And these fans are thermally activated. So, they will rev up when it first starts to do a test. And then they turn off completely. And I guess come on as needed when you're doing data transfers and it heats up. Like I said, it's not that high. I don't have a thermal imaging for that. Now, this back over here is because it actually has council access on the backs. Here's the two SFP ports over here. Pretty straightforward. Nothing, nothing too exciting. I want to at least take a look inside so I have a good idea of how this whole system works and looks inside. So here's the 48 port model. Pretty much the same. The two processors on here. Send two of these here. Like I said, I don't know what chips exactly are under there. So, the design is pretty much the same as it was for there. It has the same LED in the front. Same basic clean power supply. They did put two fans. They have one fan on this side and one fan on that side. So, a little bit different there. And you have the four SFP ports versus the two. And this is another difference of the 48 port model. Two of these SFP ports are SFP plus, which means 10 gigabit ports. So, you have two 10 gigabit ports, two gigabit SFP ports, then 48 gigabit ports on this. So, the design and everything is pretty much the same. The software and handling is all the same through the same unified software. They just have a couple more ports, but you get that 10 gigabit. Now, this also has a total switching capacity per the box. 70 gigabit. So, that means everything can be transferring in the total amount of bandwidth they can handle going across. The 70, which means lots of different things talking to lots of different things. And we still have the same thing, the same chips. Same chips exactly and configured the same way on here. Once again, clean design, nice inside everything's metal construction, just like on the 24. A couple side notes, though. I noticed when I opened it up, I see things catched us on camera. Not my fingerprints. These are some fingerprints that are pre in there that it came with. They're kind of hard to see a little thing. I'm trying to turn the brightness up to get them seen better. But yeah, there's a series of fingerprints that are kind of oily ones that are, you can actually feel whatever it is. So, someone had glue on their hands maybe when they touched it. That is an interesting side note. I looked at it, I'm like, huh, there's fingerprints on that. No wonder who's they are. Some ubiquity engineers. All right, so let's now get into the software. I'm going to go a little bit over the front of the case on these and then we'll get into the software and actually how these work. All right, so it's time to jump into the software. My last little comment is a hardware is, thank you Unify for designing it where the light for the network cable is where where you plug in the cable. I don't like these places that put a separate light on the side of the switch and a lot of manufacturers just do that and it's like, oh, look, I plugged it in, but I have to look for the light and the port number. I like seeing it right next to each one of the network jacks. It's just a lot easier when you're plugging it in. The real magic in any managed switch is going to be in the software that runs it. And I really like the Unify software. We're using it to run everything in terms of the switching fabric for the systems. Now, I have a couple of Wi-Fi in here and I left them plugged in for this demo actually plugged into our network because I wanted to show you some of the connectivity and topology. So the switches are plugged in, they're adopted, they're upgraded. It works just like any other Unify device. So if you're mirror with the other Unify line of products and the Unify controller software, which is free by the way, in case that comes up a lot, they give this to you by their hardware, they get the software for free, but it does only work with their devices. This won't manage other switches or other Wi-Fi units. The switches are DHCP by default. So you don't have to try and figure out some default IP on them. It makes it really easy. And I leave things at DHCP. This allows me to easily build a DHCP table, put all the MAC addresses in there and assign everything where I want it. So I'm happy to leave it that way. But you can go into these switches and I have an eight port, a 48 port and 24 port. I didn't demo the eight port. It really nothing significant on it. This is just for the 24 and 48. They're very similar devices, just more ports. But when you go into config, you have the option if you want under the network to change it to static IP. So you can't statically assign these if that's something you want. So you don't have to rely on DHCP servers being up when you reboot a switch. Anyways, the neat thing is when you have all these plugged in, and I really like this. So a comment about the lights next to the network port, but when you have them plugged in, you also get to see the ports here. It tells you like this one, for example, is not plugged in gigabit. This one is was green versus orange. They got a little color coding here. And a really neat. So let's look at the topology of these. This is a neat thing I want to start with in here. So this is not a map of my building. This is the default map. I've never bothered. Maybe I will load the map of my building in here. And what it lets you do is drag the devices around the show more in the building. That's pretty cool. This is really cool. This is your mapping to show you the different devices and how they're connected. And this is really clever. So what this does is there's the eight port and it goes into where most things are and there's a dumb switch behind it. So the eight port sees everything plugged in directly to it when it's obviously more devices here than the eight port. So it groups them all together because there's a unmanaged switch behind after the eight port. Then we have our 24 port switch and it draws the line. Then that's connecting to our 48 port switch. Then we have a Wi-Fi connected to that and we have our other Wi-Fi plugged into the 24. Then here's the Wi-Fi devices that show up plugged in and are attached to this particular Wi-Fi. And also you can do the link labels. So if you have multiple Wi-FIs it will show you which Wi-Fi it's connected through and give you the flow through. So this is really novel. This builds it on the fly. There's nothing I did to make this and it just shows up. So I can also just say don't show me the clients and only show me this. So if you're building out networks and they expand the contract as you click them. So really helpful for finding things. And also when you go and show clients. Let me zoom out again here. I'm just using the mouse to scroll around. It'll bring up the client over here and I can pull the information and details from that client and find out where how it's connected and how it's connected there. So it's connected to back area Wi-Fi. Goes over here and lets you kind of drill down. Really slick. This is just part of the software and it works for the ports for things. So let's go over here to the clients. And here's my computer. Tom Spuder. And when I click on this it goes right to the port that my computer's plugged into. So it's really easy to find things. So it's on the 48 port switch and we named it 48 port switch and it's port number nine. And it'll let me go right to that port. So this is really slick the way the software helps you find things. So if you don't have a label network when you plug all these in you can easily go in here and start labeling out your network and your ports and understand what's connected where and start making the changes. Now back to the devices. Now when I first plugged them in before they're adopted part of the Unify they'll be unmanaged. I just want to note they work fine unmanaged. I mean you don't get to take advantage of all the features and why would you buy one if you're not going to manage it but just so you know out of the box they work as a switch. So here's all the devices and let's jump over to the network settings and show you how you build your network settings in here. So go over here go to networks and here's the network that we're on in 192.168.3 slash 24. So you can just edit this and you know set your network settings. You want to build some VLANs. No problem. So we have test three VLAN test VLAN and the VLAN ID form. If you want to create a new one pretty easy we're gonna say VLAN only. VLAN 40 because we have the idea of 40 and it's up to you how you want to name it. They have the you know nice text naming here and then we're going to go ahead and hit save. Now what this does when I jump to the device is real quick to show you all these switches went to provisioning mode and what that means is that setting gets pushed out and provisions to the switch. Now whenever there's provisioning there's a slight pause in the network not long but if you're paying you'll see a few seconds pause for the provisioning to happen and it kind of disrupts the switch for a second and if you notice the order at which they did it went through the eight port. The 48 port took a little bit longer than 24. I'm guessing just because there's more ports to program takes a slightly longer time but it's really it's a matter of second so it's not a big deal but what I think is a little bit annoying is when I do things like this you can name any port whatever you want. So this is port six and we're going to go ahead and name it because I know port six what does it have in here. The back area we fee plugged into it as we said so we're going to call this the wi-fi port port for what was called wi-fi for back area so apply great I applied it it's provisioning it so if everyone's running full tilt on the switch there's going to be a slight delay before it works and it's like I said it's maybe only one or two seconds but if you've worked in you know high-demand environments even a second blip people go oh my gosh everything pause now it doesn't show disconnected on the network it doesn't cause that level of problem but it does pause network traffic slightly just wanted to make a side note of that but I thought it was odd that it doesn't even when I name something so I didn't know functionality to switch I just gave it a name now let's go back into the ports and just show you a couple other things so you have these options in here for the profile overrides and the different profiles that we set up here now this is kind of cool because this is a two-part thing so here's the v-lands we set up here's v-land 10 v-land 40 test v-land 3 and it's got the name and brackets there so you know which v-land tag it is really simple and it shows up on all the switches so we're gonna go over here to ports on this 24 port one and grab any random port even if it's not plugged in doesn't matter profile and we can choose those networks and v-lands this is kind of slick because it actually has a couple different options in here so if we go back over here to our settings profiles switch ports you can build actual profile so all or disabled which is disabled at port all together so you can actually disable ports on there so if you're worried about security you go I want the ports disabled unless I implicitly turn them on definitely an option there and here's where you create a v-lands we can actually create a profile and some test profile so let's give it a real simple name here now if the switches are poe and you can mix poe and non poe switches this profile maybe you want it to modify the poe settings what's the native network for it what are the tag networks and go through there so we can say native land I'll say select all but maybe we'll drop out this one so we want it to be able to route just these networks and then we hit save and it's going to go up here to the switches you're going to see them switched to provisioning it's going to takes a second it doesn't it's pretty fast then that profile will show up in there so here's the one we created some test profile land link negotiation auto so you can edit it because it's an editable one so self-created one let me go over here to devices oh we have a port open already so let me close that so I can get to one and here's a custom profile we set and that allows us to set specific parameters on the port so if you have some specific parameters this makes it really easy to apply a bunch of them at once also if you want to apply a bunch of them at once you can do it this way you can select a few ports and group these into a vlan or our custom profile however you want to do it but that's really easy to grab segments of the switch and push all the settings to that segment of the switch makes it really easy for management because you can say okay this block is grouped to this and this block is grouped to that and as you notice I'm selecting them they're physically laying out over here how those ports are based on the ones I selected so it kind of gives you a visual reference of how the switch is laid out what the switch looks like this is also kind of cool to me cancel what I was doing here so close this close and I'm going to show you an eight port switch I'll pop this out real quick I love the way it does the things now this is the eight port one let's go to the 48 port pop this one out so you can create kind of these floating windows when you're doing it as well so you can kind of look and compare side by side just intuitive software like this makes the switches a lot easier to manage a lot easier to use and also you may have noticed that there are uplinks and downlinks on these so when you're looking at the network the ports the users that are attached to this network uplink to this is the 24 port switch and by clicking it it lets me pop this out again so now here's the eight the 48 and the 24 and we're going to look at the downlinks on here and it looks at what the downlink network devices are so we know the uplink port gives us a little symbol then we can see the downlink devices so we know this is uplink to the eight port switch and downlinked to the 48 port switch and downlinked to the LTS office Wi-Fi and when we jump back over here to the map so topology a couple of these out of the way and just close them and we don't care about the clients we just want to show the devices we'll take out the link labels make it clean we can see that so it goes here to here to here to here it lays it out for you so you can see as you build your network and as they plug in it builds this in real time so you can make sure that when you're doing some documentation that your documentation shows what this does so you know someone plugs something in wrong there's a really nice feature and it's just really cool the way it does this it's doing it on the fly we also did some testing it does this and things to take about five minutes to refresh you can though and i'll show you this real quick in the preferences you can enable the refresh button and the preferences and i went up here to the user and enabled that it puts this little button here so if you're doing something you don't want to take a glance at it because i want to know now what's going on you can do this and kind of force a refresh of the devices on on there and it will re-queue all the information so it builds the latest information it only seems to delay a few seconds from then for things that are on different devices so that's definitely really cool the way it does that now sorry what a couple of features the switch has you can look at the performance of the switch it shows you a cpu an information on there like the utilization information memory usage load averages i don't know how super relevant these are you can also go into the config on all the switches click on the debug terminal open terminal and you're presented with the standard linux command terminal in here i like it because you don't have to you can ssh into these but you don't have to use any external software that way you can just jump in this way it's already dropped in at the like root slash management level and we can go cat slash proc cpu info and see that these are all running little arm processors so they're pretty lightweight but get the job done and i don't think the load's overly wrong because it's not telling you the load of the network when it tells you load it's telling you the load of the processor you can actually run top on here and i've noticed when we're passing traffic back and forth on here it's not dumping a bunch of load onto this because the chips themselves handle all the offload of the actual switching itself so it pretty straightforward now in the services by default it has our tsp enabled but you can go back to stp or disable that feature all together you also get 802.11x control if you want to set that up so you can able you know locking in through a radius server the ip 802.11x mac authentication so that is a feature on there so you can really lock these down so your standard features you get with the managed switch now something kind of novel here and we'll go over here to the 48 port one and pop it out close that when you're editing the ports the other options that come up let's say we want to group some ports together for link aggregation you can link aggregate all the different ports together you just have to do them sequentially so we're going to go here and here's the mirroring option for a port so if we wanted to mirror it and put the other port that you wanted to have a mirror on you can aggregate the port so we'll go ahead and aggregate a couple of ports together and then hit apply and when we come down here now i only have to edit and it says aggregating port 45 pretty straightforward and simple so it makes it easy to do and makes it easy to edit and if you want to turn that off just turn it back into switching apply they're back to being switching ports i believe you can aggregate the SFPs as well yes so it will let you aggregate the SFPs as well so that's cool so i can do that and i can aggregate the SFP ports so this does have two 10 gigabit SFP plus ports and then two SFPs this is only under 48 that i'm aware they don't have any 24 port miles i've seen or i'm aware of any coming out that have 10 gigabit on them that would be kind of nice if they did but i don't think too many companies make those now other options on the ports if you can assign it specific vlands like i was showing so you can easily assign that there to say this port is for that vlan enable port isolation or manually also override the duplex modes on here so pretty common stuff that you can find in a managed switch i just really like how easy they made it to do and how i can just label things on any port of what's on that port actually i had my laptop plugged in here and i unplugged it so it still just labeled tom's laptop this is kind of tool i like how it puts a little eye on there when you set it to port mirroring so if i mirror port i edit it real quick you just pick the port you want to mirror pick the port you want to mirror it too and away you go you end up with a little mirror on there so right there port mirroring and if you notice in the background it paused for a second and flipped is that was re provisioning it so kind of neat so if you had some monitoring devices you want you can just go mirror a certain port to push all the data also to that port look so these are pretty straightforward things you get with a managed switch and it comes in here i just really like how intuitive so i'm not trying to log in a web interface for these and instead of logging into a web interface for each individual one is what i meant so instead of trying to go into each one i can do everything from here and it just cascades to the everything else and when you add new devices it gets all those same vlands so it makes setting all this up pretty much a breeze you don't have to try and figure out and match everything when you set up a new switch you just adopt it into the network in all the settings including custom profiles and all that just come right back in with it so pretty much a good overview of these i'm really happy with them the performance and everything you know we did basic testing it didn't really run any problems i didn't have enough devices to really load this up and i didn't have an sfp tank to do that i believe you can find some tests that people have done on these but they work as they say on the box uh from what i've read in the forums and reviews there's they they claim the spec on them they match the spec they are full of gigabit uh non-blocking plenty of bandwidth you can get through here and it just works really well they really haven't had any headaches with them we've deployed these for clients these ones are getting deployed at a larger installation i wish i could show some of the installations we've done uh but unfortunately there's a lot of you know security reasons and privacy reasons we don't show clients we build everything in our lab and show you how it works but hopefully this is a good overview of these switches and the uh i'm probably doing a unify review of the unify controller software again because now that we've got to this version 5622 it's probably been about a year since reviewed the software overall and that's one thing i really like about unify is their software keeps getting better and we were just laughing at just how old this a wi-fi device on our network is when it says lts office wi-fi this is one of their version ones i don't know three or four years ago we installed this still works great still getting updates the software still handles all the updates firmware updates and everything for it and still functions with this one that is only i don't know it arrived a week ago so it's it's not too old i know it's a slightly older models i think they have v3 hardware out now but unify keeps updating the software so you keep getting more features so you see you get everything you see here but if you buy this six months from now there's probably gonna be a new version with more features added to it so the unify software keeps improving keeps adding features and uh you just keep updating it i've been really excited for the company because they're also very responsive if you find any flaws in it you post it in the forums they're very quick to get updates on these and close bugs if you find them anyway it's hopefully helpful and make some decisions on these give them a big thumbs up really happy with the device no complaints with it and it works really well all right thanks for watching if you like to content here if you have some questions leave me in the comments below