We have a client that will be needing to replace their switches soon and since they already are using a UDM Pro (and are very happy with it) are considering going with Ubiquiti switches. They are currently using 3 Cisco SG350-28p switches.
Does Ubiquiti match Cisco’s in terms of robustness/reliability/features? Our client uses many VLANs and is also using a VOIP system with PoE phones that do pass through to their PCs.
Thank you!!
If that is their requirements then yes it can handle all those features. I run unifi in production at multiple businesses. I think cisco is over priced for what you get. I’d argue that unifi is 100% enterprise grade.
While I agree the Unifi switches are suitable for most businesses, they are not by definition enterprise grade - maybe with the new ECS series but those aren’t in the wild yet. Enterprise, meaning large business use case where redundancy is key, requires redundant and replaceable PSUs and fans (to be connected to separate UPSs and PDUs), true stacking on edge switches so port aggregation can happen with ports on different switches in the stack, and multichassis aggregation (MLAG/VPC/VLTi/etc) across core switches that aren’t stacked together.
A true enterprise use case is like my dayjob - we have over a dozen warehouses that each ship multiple millions of dollars of inventory per day, with a diverse range of automation and other technologies, and a failure of a non-redundant/diverse switch might cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars between delayed orders, upgrading shipping to more expedited types, employee overtime, etc. We could not consider Unifi switches as they exist today. THAT is “enterprise grade”. Sadly the industry doesn’t have a good term for something that is reliable but not at the standards of large enterprises.
To be completely fair the Cisco SG family is not enterprise grade either. And that is fine. They are different tiers.
I simply disagree and I’m not going to go into a full blow argument over this. You give a single feature that UniFi doesn’t have and then claim because it doesn’t have said feature it’s not enterprise grade.
Many of us infrastructure engineers, system administrators and network engineers on this forum and others have deployed UniFi in enterprise environments time and time again. I’m not sure what the infatuation is with Cisco, HP or (insert your “enterprise” appliance) admins getting bent out of shape that UniFi can do 95% of the feature set at a fraction of the cost. No licensing.
Take Cisco for example. They have yet to remove insecure cipher suites for ssh. Talk about integrity in your enterprise environment. Well built!
It is hard to tell from the post. Check your requirements and Cisco switch code possibly looking at VOIP priority queues that you will have to reimplement in Unifi. Also, do you have any 10Mb devices, like badge scanners, that can sometimes be painful to get up.
If you haven’t already, I suggest you watch some of the Unifi videos Lawrence has done. He appears to like Unifi a lot more now.
My network uses HP Aruba switches and an old Unifi gateway. I need to upgrade the gateway and add a L3 switch at the new gateway to better route the VLAN traffic. Whereas the mixed network works, a mixed vendor solution can be more difficult to maintain so I may be going back to all Unifi. Think about your support costs with mixed vendor solutions.
Good luck.
The new ECS Aggregation can speak BGP (you supply a FRR config file) and I believe will speak OSPF soon. At the scale of true enterprise, its their only switch intended to do layer 3 - no indication that they are going to try and play in the spine and leaf topology that I see. In other words they are gearing up to compete for enterprise campus (large offices), not enterprise datacenter at the moment. A lot depends on what the ECS non-aggregation switches support, those have scant details at the moment.
To be clear I’m not going to recommend my company move away from Nexus in datacenter and Meraki everywhere else for a while, but looking on with interest.
First thing, cisco is way over priced for what you get and the management of cisco switches is something to be desired. I could go on about the weakness of cisco, but thats another post for another day.
I would suggest and recommend getting rid of cisco and using unifi since you already have the UDM Pro in place. The Unifi switches can do most of what cisco does and the interface to configure Vlans and such is much simpler.
I usually use CLI for Debian Servers.
Its always a little strange seeing people making blanket recommendations for one brand over another like this without considering the business requirements.
Op has a site that is currently running 3x Cisco SG350-28P switches (which are the Cisco SMB Managed 24 port with PoE). These are targeting the SMB and not the enterprise market. The direct replacement would be something like the Cisco CBS350-48P-4G which goes for about CAD$750. This line of switches would be where UniFi devices play and would make them a good consideration for replacement.
As to if they are the correct replacement for your customer, then you need to look at the requirements. For Example:
For example, the Cisco CBS switches come with pretty good NAC support. If you are running a desk hoteling office that needs to be able to do dynamic VLAN assignment, and you need the certainty of a 5year+ warranty, then that might be a deal breaker for the UniFi.
I personally think that the UniFi devices are a good fit for some deployments. Combining Router, Switching, and Wireless into the unified stack can be pretty compelling. Add in Cameras and it makes a good office in a box.
Having said that, a lot of the sites I work with have more complicated routing (OSPF/BGP) redistribution then I would want to support on a Unifi device making them unsuitable for Core, Distribution switching. But that is not their target market.