3 ms·

I sympathize with the poster, as deploying my own stack should've been an easier migration from their EdgeRouter kit than it turned out to be - though wisely, I

I sympathize with the poster, as deploying my own stack should've been an easier migration from their EdgeRouter kit than it turned out to be - though wisely, I had budgeted a six hour window for a process that ultimately took ~2hrs. Ubiquiti's niche really is the "I want Enterprise features but I also don't want to be my own CCIE to run this shit," and in that sense it overachieves nicely. Does it have idiosyncrasies? You betcha, and OP found this out first hand. Would I trust this for blind/hands-off remote site deployment? Hell naw, that's what Meraki is for. Would I build a data center around these? Maybe, depending on the data center's function? Honestly, my wishlist for the product suite is a stronger focus on self-hosting, removing the Bluetooth app requirement for initial setup of hardware, improving zero touch provisioning, and letting me use Identity without having to tie it to their servers (e.g., local LDAP or SAML/SSO integration). That'd make me a happy dinosaur.

aksss 5mo ago
Interesting, for my part I would never build a data center (or underpin critical infrastructure) with Ubiquiti but I have a lot of it at blind remote sites and it works well enough - WAN failover, and they've built out a fair bit of downstream failover as well - shadow gateways, RPS, etc. Has replaced a lot of Meraki subscriptions.
- stego-tech 5mo ago
  Ooh, I'd love to hear how you've made that work because ZTD with Ubiquiti - at least in their Bluetooth app deployment era - has been a crapshoot for me. As for data centers, I should be clear on sizing: we're talking the same sort of footprints you'd see Meraki leveraged for (<10 racks, mostly traditional storage/hypervisors/big iron stuff), not HPCs and Hyperscalers and the like. Y'know, standard VLAN-based isolation, traditional load balancers instead of network overlays, maybe the odd eBGP for public cloud connectivity with the new Ubiquiti Network update. Areas where I don't need QSFP+ to endpoints and where budget forces me to choose between hardware and headcount (an area Ubiquiti and Meraki excel in). Even then, I'd really only lean into Ubiquiti over Meraki if I'm trying to conserve capital and I'm unsure of scaling: Ubiquiti is cheaper to replace if I need to scale up than Meraki, but Meraki's support is generally far superior than Ubiquiti since it's Cisco folk. Could I build a data center on Ubiquiti? Totally. Would I? That's highly dependent on the specific context.
  - aksss 5mo ago
    [dead]

aksss 5mo ago

Interesting, for my part I would never build a data center (or underpin critical infrastructure) with Ubiquiti but I have a lot of it at blind remote sites and it works well enough - WAN failover, and they've built out a fair bit of downstream failover as well - shadow gateways, RPS, etc. Has replaced a lot of Meraki subscriptions.

stego-tech 5mo ago
Ooh, I'd love to hear how you've made that work because ZTD with Ubiquiti - at least in their Bluetooth app deployment era - has been a crapshoot for me. As for data centers, I should be clear on sizing: we're talking the same sort of footprints you'd see Meraki leveraged for (<10 racks, mostly traditional storage/hypervisors/big iron stuff), not HPCs and Hyperscalers and the like. Y'know, standard VLAN-based isolation, traditional load balancers instead of network overlays, maybe the odd eBGP for public cloud connectivity with the new Ubiquiti Network update. Areas where I don't need QSFP+ to endpoints and where budget forces me to choose between hardware and headcount (an area Ubiquiti and Meraki excel in). Even then, I'd really only lean into Ubiquiti over Meraki if I'm trying to conserve capital and I'm unsure of scaling: Ubiquiti is cheaper to replace if I need to scale up than Meraki, but Meraki's support is generally far superior than Ubiquiti since it's Cisco folk. Could I build a data center on Ubiquiti? Totally. Would I? That's highly dependent on the specific context.
- aksss 5mo ago
  [dead]