 All right, I have something new from Unify. It is a Unify Cloud Key Gen 2 Plus. Okay, so it's not new and no, this video is not old. I'm recording it here in July of 2019. And we've actually had this for several months. We've been testing it for quite a while. And I wanted to do the review differently so the unboxing's not gonna be too exciting about this. But I wanted to do something a little different with the review and not just like, hey, look, this new fancy shiny thing works. I wanted to use it. So we've actually had it kicking around the office. We've had it in the lab area, the store area. We've had it in our studio area for a while. We've had cameras connected. We've disconnected it. We replaced hard drives in it multiple times. We've unplugged it randomly quite a few times. And it's also survived the many iterations we've seen this year of the Unify software, both the protect software and the Unify software that manages everything else. And that was the important component to me was does it survive all these updates? Cause it's cool to pull something out of the box and see something new that works because well, that's a lot of new things work. That's great. But do they survive updates? That's really where the problems are. And I bring this up because if for those of you that are familiar with the Cloud Key Gen 1, the little plastic ugly box ones, okay, I'm just gonna call it out there. They were not pretty boxes, sorry Unify. They were okay. They were basic, they ran Debian, which this does as well. And they got the job done. But there were some update issues with them over time and they've been around for quite a few years. We've had a few deployed at clients. Like I said, they do get the job done but they're not very fast. And of course that's an aging product. This on the other hand is quite fast and much more well-designed and everything about it is much, much improved versus there. It's almost like, I know it's a Gen 2 but it's a substantial upgrade overall in both performance and usability and how it works. And it's really cool display that we're gonna show here. So let's get to the unboxing part. All right, so here's the box and it fits together really well. So it's kind of got that suction effect when it comes out. The boxes are actually quite sturdy so it feels really well packaged. I'll give them, you know, you don't want things messing up and shipping. So that's definitely an issue. It does come with this and little slide out tab to tell us what the things are on it. So, you know, we've got the, it has a one terabyte hard drive has shipped in there which we did take out and I'll cover that in a second. LCD display and what those are comes with a couple of stickers and let's just show you what it looks like more directly. This was wrapped in plastic but we got rid of the plastic wrap on it. And I didn't feel like rewrapping it just for the video. And we'll turn it on a second but there's a nice little display on this. Then on the other side we got a power button, power via USB-C reset button, an SD card you can put in there so it can save all the backups on there. That's definitely a nice feature. So it's got its own internal storage but then you can also add micro SDs and back things up to it. You have, I'm assuming USB-C for external storage based on that. Yes, that's for storage. And then we have the 802.3 AF power. So you can power this over PoE which I really like. That's actually how we've been using it is with the PoE. Now on the bottom here, we have this right here so you can, it's supposed to be an edge connector and I haven't really looked at this. I think they have a dock that it sits on. I don't know if it feels unnecessary. Then this, a little bit tricky, we'll get it open. There we go. And this is how we pop out the hard drive. And it exposes that I've stuck a SanDisk SSD in there. So I didn't want to take it apart any further. I didn't really dig. I'm assuming I would have to peel some plastic off and I didn't want to really wreck it like this. I didn't see any easy way just to pop the entire system apart to really dig into the components on it. But that's aluminum. It is really well made. Actually, there's no flex. When I'm squeezing this thing, it is a really solid piece here. Also, please note that the hard drive in here, even though I'm using an SSD, they left you a gap. So if you have to use a thicker hard drive, it works. And the reason, there's an SSD, huge reason there's an SSD in here which good news is these are becoming much cheaper, is when we hooked up the 4K camera, we found playback really, really sluggish. And that was a performance problem. Now, the system will even work without the SSD in it, or a hard drive in it, but Unify Protect has nowhere to save its data. It does have a separate storage that manages the OS and everything else on here. And then this SSD is only for storage of the videos that being said, when you replace this, there's not much you have to do. It's smart enough to go, hey, look, you replaced the drive, and it formats it and sets it up and configures it for you, and away you go. I like that this is actually a little hard to release. It takes a little effort, so it doesn't, you're certainly not worried about falling out and it solid click right into place. So all that was been great about it. No complaints about that from a hardware standpoint. There's also a battery in here. So when you pull it out, it does a little countdown. And the countdown will tell you how long it takes to shut down. But that's all about the hardware. Now let's talk about the software on it because that's where the real excitement begins. So the unit's off and all's I'm plugging in is one network cable. And you can watch the boot up process now. Get the cool little Unify logo popping up and a little progress bar that tells you where you're going with it. So like I said, this is really nice, the notifications on there. And then it starts a little blinking here. With this hard drive in it, obviously there's no fans, no nothing. I'm assuming the aluminum body, I can't really say it even gets that warm. It gets maybe slightly warm. It's not a hot component at all. But what it does do is probably dissipates the heat through the aluminum. And with an SSD in there, like I said, this is 100% silent, nothing down there. So let's go ahead and it's booted up, which by the way, way faster than the previous one. And it tells you the IP address that it's at. So hey, here we go. We know the information on it. Nice little display. I really like the display on this. Being able to look at a glance and go, hey, what IP address is this at? And it tells you each thing that's running on here. Now this does come in two flavors. If I didn't mention it, there is a Cloud Key Gen 2 and the Gen 2 Plus. The Gen 2 Plus is the one with the hard drive that has the Unify Protect for the video. And we're gonna cover that here. But if you just want the Gen 2, it's pretty cool. But may as well, it's not much more you can get the Gen 2 Plus. And then you have the other thing to put a couple of cameras on here. So it's a great solution for like a small home office that you'll need a few cameras on. Cause that's the one thing about the Unify Protect software is it doesn't have a really big amount of cameras, many cameras that it can support. It's the one downside of it. It's not like there are other software to Unify Video. But I've got a video that I'll leave a link to below where I discuss the two different products because they're now discontinuing the Unify Video and going with Protect. And I do feel so Protect in the future, based on its name, will probably have more features in it besides just cameras. We'll wait and see and see how that goes with Unify. Now I'll actually demo this too. The, if we unplug it, it does nice graceful shutdown. Whoops. Okay, get that out. Hold on. There we go. And it's gonna give us a warning. Shutting down in six, five, four. We're gonna stop this so we can log into it. And that's the system by which it goes through and counts down. And if there's a loss in power, gracefully shutting things down. Now this was a problem with the Gen 1s is you lose power and MongoDB, especially some of the earlier versions that they were using. Well, databases can get corrupted when there's unexpected shutdowns that is solved by having a small battery inside of this, which is really neat because that way if something happens and things power off, no problem. And it's now completely happy. But it, like I said, it goes through the shutdown and process and gives you a little warning. Hey, power's out. And let's, you know, it's going to shut down gracefully and properly. Do it. That's a huge improvement on these. So let's dig into the menu here and what happens when we go to 172.16.69.156, which was the IP address displayed on the front of the Unify. I do like that you don't have to hunt for it. It just grabs the IP and tells you what it is. So you have, you can launch the Unify network. You can launch Unify Protect or you can manage your cloud key. We're gonna go from managing the cloud key. The default credentials are UBNT, UBNT. We've actually changed them from the fault. And now you can take a look at it. So Unify Network active, Unify Protect is active, firmware version, the storage, Storage 2. So this is the internal EMCC storage. This is the storage we have for the hard drive that we put in here. Up time, five minutes, because we just booted it. Qualcomm 64-bit, eight cores in there. So I like that it gives you some of the details. You can look at the CPU load, CPU temp, memory, storage, Storage 2. You can start and stop the Unify network services or the Protect services. You can look at the activity for data transferred. You can also go in Advanced Configuration and set a fallback IP when it doesn't get an IP from DCP or you can set this to be static and set static address for this. So it comes up with the same IP every time. You do that in here. My personal preference is to have the firewall set static IPs that it's specifically hands out for but design it as you will. You can name it, pick the location, do a factory reset, power off, reboot, update manually on the firmware. Now, this is something that I, one of the long-term reviews I did was making sure this survives firmware updates and it has. And we're gonna take a look at some of the software on it but that's the part that's been great is we're gonna start with the Unify software here. I'm logged in, I have one device connected. You know, it's the same Unify controller software that you're used to and it is the latest version. It updates really smooth. So it's like the controller we are running and this is the most current as of today, 5.10.25 as of July 2019. And I haven't had a single problem. We've watched this thing go through update after update after update and that was kind of the point. Make sure it survives updates. Make sure it goes, oh man, this causes a problem. And some people know there's been trouble when you've updated the controllers and you host them yourself. Sometimes you run in issues. This being specifically hardware from Unify with the update process from Unify and you're running Unify top to bottom. This does work really well. I generally don't have any problems running the updates when I host my own controller. But if there are issues, you know, they do arise. There's little quirks. We ran into a client who was having problems with their controller updating. They just didn't have enough memory allocated to the VM. They were running it in and it was causing some corruption issues. Those kind of things aren't things you have to take into consideration. If you get this and that's kind of the why you would buy one of these, you just want it to work. Now, the Unify Protect software, let's talk a little bit about that. You can't run Protect officially on anything other than these. Now, we expect at some point in the future because they do sell other servers that Unify will be having this on a roadmap so you runify Protect. You can load it on one of their other higher end ones to support more cameras. But that is not true as of this moment right now because when you go to the Unify Protect page they have the whole Unify camera lineup and we do have a G4 Pro connected. We've tested with a couple other cameras. Matter of fact, we'll show you how to add a camera in here. It works with all these cool cameras, which is great but there are some limitations of only up to 20 cameras. It does ship with that one terabyte storage that we found actually to be kind of slow when playing back videos at 4K when we were doing some testing with it. SSD works fine. We haven't any problem at all with that. The cool, they got the rack mount accessory in here but yeah, only supporting just this one device right now and having that limitation of up to 20 cameras and it doesn't say if they're all 4K. So I'm not real sure how many, I don't have 24K cameras to test but I have feeling that 4K cameras, 20 may be a bit excessive for this machine. But let's go back and look at the camera software itself. And maybe I'll do a more in-depth video. I know Chris over at Crosstalk has a good video on the Unify Protect software that I liked. It's not bad. It's very much a similar to the way Unify software worked with the other one but you can't download and run it yourself so it does have to run on one of their pieces of hardware and we'll show you the live view real quick. And I have G4 Pro camera sitting right here. Yes, it's gonna be grainy when it does it like this. It actually defaults to like a lower res, low stream. And we'll actually go back over to the camera. We can go to live feed and turn sound off. And you can up it up so it does do higher res when you want it to. So that's definitely an option when you're pulling the stream. And I've done a review of this specific camera as well. Has all the motion events in here and we can play those back. Actually, what time did Tom get here this morning? It's probably me playing with it early this morning. Yep. So there's the me doing that. And in here, let's go ahead and make it full screen. You can see it's very the resolution and playback and everything. And this is all really snappy and fast. This is why we put the system in with the SSD. When we didn't have the SSD, there was a lot of hesitation only with the 4K. When we had the other camera, it seemed to work fine. But I have a feeling a hard drive is just spinning rust hard drive is just not capable of keeping up with how much data that is. Because 4K is four times the size just about of your center 1080. You're talking about four times the pixels. So even after you compress it, there's still quite a bit of data you have to move. And at some point, you just hit the limits of how much data you can stream off of a hard drive. But it is very snappy, as you can see, for doing it this way. So no problems there. As far as adding cameras, now I did this and I used one of these in my network office build video. And one of the things to point out from a design standpoint is everything's on that same 172, 16, 69, 156 address. And I say that because when you're designing a network, some people want to put things like the NVR on a separate network with the cameras on a separate network. Well, I mean, you can, but I will admit, one of the things you're gonna run into is you can't that I've seen easily split the network to multiple different networks. Not to mention, it's one interface. So you'd have to split them out into some type of VLANs. So the Unify Protect and the Unify SDN controller both end up being on the same network. So if that's a problem, there's kind of a workaround and I have that in my network office build video, which I'll leave a link to where I use one of these because the camera is when you adopt them, they seek out the IP address, even when you move these to a different network. So currently this is on the same subnet as the Unify Cloud Key. But if I put this on a different subnet, as long as that subnet has access to that network, it knows what it was talking to. So I can change the IP address to the camera and then it will still route back over to the Cloud Key. So that's something worth noting on there. The protect seems to work no problem with that. I've tested it and we can put this on any network as long as we can get back to this network with the rules, you can get it working. Now, as far as the Unify Protect software, like I said, it seems very adequate for a small office or a small business, but you only need a handful of cameras. It has worked. It has also survived all the updates. Adding cameras is not a problem. So I do have another camera here. This is the G3 sitting behind me. So it's got this, there we go. It's gonna adopt and add it. And it really hasn't been a problem adding removing cameras, but the question that comes up all the time because I will admit Unify has a really nice camera software from a visual standpoint from the standpoint of ease of use. My clients, we've given it to, they love it. We've put a few of these in people's homes and they go, wow, this is just easy. I can see it on my phone, et cetera, et cetera, but it does only support Unify cameras. I didn't know it was the most frequent question I see in someone's still going to, even though I've said this in this video, well, can I use XYZ camera? No, Unify has a ecosystem that is kind of locked in when it comes to that. The Unify cameras work with the Unify Protect or the Unify Video and that's it. So that is an important aspect of them when you're discussing the Unify cameras. Other side note, when we connect this camera to the standard Unify video, I don't get the cool spinny circle thing. That is a Unify Protect feature, unless they've added it recently to Unify Video. Last time we tested this on our Unify Video server, we didn't get the cool circle that tells you there's motion detected, so. But either way, who is the Unify Protect for? Let's talk about that. So if you are someone who goes, I don't want to deal with any hosting or anything, I want it all to be internal, locally discoverable, and I want to run a couple cameras locally, get one of these, it's a very simple solution. I would probably recommend it for home users who, they don't want to deal with any of the running their own VM or loading the Unify system on an dedicated machine or a dedicated VM or host it in a cloud or something, they want it all internal and make it simple. It fits on your shelf real nice, it's PoE, it's quiet if you put an SSD in there. And it makes a nice little small business system or small office system, I should say, where you only have that couple cameras and a couple of unifies and you want everything local. The last little thing I will cover is whatever the password you set is for UBNT, you can log in and it is running Linux. So you can SSH into it, that's on by default, which is kind of cool. So if you wanted to get in here and poke around and see what CPU details are and things like that, that's in there, so obviously like it said, it's the Qualcomm Technologies. You can see where the drives are mounted and how some of that's working internal. So pretty straightforward and simple if you wanna poke around, it is just running Linux. You can run apt-get update on it as well, which I thought was kind of novel. I don't know if it'll do an upgrade, but I imagine it's just pulling from their repositories. So interesting, I actually went a little further, I took a look and the first time I've done this is I looked in apt-conf and they do have both unattended upgrades turned on, which is awesome, because it's gonna be automatically doing security updates and it's pulling from, besides the Unify, it has the, let's see, what do we have here? It's running on Debian Stretch, so yeah, this is novel as well. We've got the standard Debian repositories in there, so I thought they would've spun their own and then ported it over so they have something more custom, but they're actually running a pretty standard installation of Debian here, so that's actually really great as far as I'm concerned, so they didn't hack away at it too much or make it overly custom. So my overall thoughts on this, I really like it. It works well. We haven't had any problems with it and we've been recording and been taking cameras on and off and moving it around and just unplugging it. It seems to have no issues at all and there has been zero times I've actually had to log into the command line to fix anything. Like I said, it's just survived updates for both the Cloud Key software, the Unify Protect software, and the Unify SDN software. It's been really trouble-free for that, so if you're looking for a very automated system in your house that you can have or in your small office that you can have your own control over, this is great. So I'll leave a link below where you can get this and that's it, thank you. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. If you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post. If you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video, head over to launchsystems.com where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us. Also, if you want to carry on the discussion further, head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can keep the conversation going. 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