TP-Link Omada "Short Stack" - Entry level Omada hardware

it seems as though in the last few years the line between enterprise and consumer networking gear has become increasingly blurred i said that as a good thing gone are the days of low power hardware and painfully limited software today you can find reputable brands with lines of networking gear catered not only towards enterprise and home lab users but for just regular people who want to get the most out of their networking hardware we're going to be taking a look at tp-link omada's lineup and what i'm specifically calling the short stack this is what i would consider the perfect jumping off point to upgrade your home network into something modern fast and with all the bells and whistles you should ever need so what is omada well it's a line from tp-link that is considered a business solution but like we said it's not only catered towards business users now yes it has awesome business features like being easily scalable and having site-to-site vpn management so that you can deploy this at all your different locations and it essentially acts as one network so yeah cool business features but how does that help you the regular home lab user well one cool thing about the omada lineup is that you can easily buy these products now i know that sounds weird like you can buy everything on amazon these days but if you look at a lot of other business level or enterprise level networking equipment you have to essentially jump through hoops just to get prices and quotes and be able to purchase these so with omada you don't have to go through any third party or any vendors or anything you can just hop on amazon or whatever store you want and purchase these products which is very underrated when it comes to certain products in this field that brings me to my next point in that this equipment is extremely affordable like compared to other business level equipment yeah you're not gonna find much with as many features as this for a lower price so let's walk through the parts i'll discuss what i have here and why i would consider it the perfect jumping off point into something like omada let's start with the controller and i know that might be a strange term for you to hear when talking about a networking stack used to things like switches routers firewalls access points but here we have a controller and this is something you may or may not need now you do need to run the omada controller software whether you want that to run on omada's dedicated controller here or if you want to run that on your own hardware or even virtualize it both those options are legitimate so if you want to just plug and play and have the omada controller set everything up be able to have all the features out of the omada network then get yourself an oc 200 it is a hundred dollars i'm a fan of dedicated hardware for networking equipment so this is what i run now essentially all this is going to do is run the controller software and essentially allow you to access features remotely so this will be connected to the internet giving you remote features so obviously you need it but you don't necessarily need this piece of hardware next let's talk about the router or the firewall this is the er605 and yeah it is 60 so yeah pretty freaking affordable and you do get all the modern security features that you would expect out of a modern firewall you also get five ports one being a dedicated wan port four lan ports two of those can be switched between when or land so in total three wands which is awesome imagine paying sixty dollars for a router that can handle three wands with load balancing that is that was awesome you also get plenty of vpn options with this like openvpn ipsec l2 tp and pptp so whatever type of vpn you want to run you should be good to go you also get those expected features out of a sophisticated network setup like vlans load balancing bandwidth control and like i said multiple wans so yeah for sixty dollars having this be your firewall well worth 60 bucks i challenge you to find a feature set in any router or firewall better than this for around 60 good luck okay next let's talk about the switch this is the tl sg208p and it is an eight port switch it is all gigabit but four of those ports or ore four of these ports are poe plus giving you a total of 62 watts of power which is extremely convenient to have especially when a lot of access points and other networking equipment like cameras are being powered by poe these days it is good to have at least a couple of poe ports why can't i say that a couple of poe ports in your network and through the switch you get 16 gigabits per second of switching capacity which is bonkers and obviously you get to manage all your vlans and features coming from your router so yeah how much do you think this would cost if you guessed 88 you probably looked it up so congrats for cheating but yeah 88 as you can tell our price point is extremely aggressive here so i'm not seeing a downside of this yet nothing's perfect so let's jump into the access point this is the eap670 it is a wi-fi six access point with a full 160 megahertz channel so you are getting the most out of wi-fi six with this obviously not wi-fi 6e but i mean nothing uses wi-fi 6e right now so on the 5 gigahertz channel you get 4 800 megabits per second throughput which holy crap that's a lot and on the 2.4 gigahertz channel you're only getting 574 megabits throughput but nothing really uses 2.4 that much anymore besides older devices and iot stuff so personally i don't care to have a crazy amount of bandwidth on 2.4 but you know those are stats take them for what they are one cool thing i really like about this access point not only is it powered by poe but the port is 2.5 gigabit now immediately you're probably thinking cool 2.5 but the switch you just showed me is only one gigabit we'll get to that but along with the features i mentioned earlier you do get a lot of modern creature comforts with the wi-fi configurations in omada like amada mesh band steering load balancing rate limiting and wireless scheduling so so there's not really much you're going to be longing for in terms of features if you go with the nomado wi-fi setup that's for sure and this comes in at 150 which i think is more in line with their competitors so total for all of this which gives you a pretty awesome jumping in point for the omada setup is just under 400 and that's honestly not too bad it could be less if you decide to virtualize or run the omada software on your own hardware you could do it for just under 300 without the controller so yeah what would a similar setup from unify cost obviously the products aren't going to match up one to one but i went to the unified store and specced out a setup that would give you similar specifications as this entire stack and that came out to 637 so yeah under 400 versus 637 you can see that we are clearly getting a benefit in terms of price with the omada lineup so pros and cons to going with this setup or omada in general let's talk about it pros for something like this as you can tell the physical footprint for this is extremely small so it is a god send to home libraries with minimal space or people that want to just chuck this in a closet somewhere and don't have a full rack to set up rack mounted gear yeah this is assuming you're gonna not put your access point on your desk uh yeah this is a pretty small footprint here like you got to be able to find space for this along with that the access points in the omada lineup are extremely fast and have a rich feature set so they have this one that i mentioned before i also have this guy that i've used which is the hd 6600 60 eap hd 660. but again both are wi-fi six both have very high throughputs and both have 2.5 gigabit uplink which can't be overlooked especially if you want to future proof your wi-fi setup another pro is that you are getting an extremely rich feature set with the entire omada lineup so like i said it's catered towards businesses and enterprises so you do get those enterprise features but those things are you know things that we want as power users or home lab users so having a lot of those features built in to your now home network is something that can't really be understated i know some of you don't care about multiple lands or vlans or site-to-site vpns or vpns in general but a lot of people do these days so having that built in is extremely nice to have another pro is that like i said you can host your own controller software you don't have to buy omada's dedicated hardware you can host it on whatever system you want but just know that you need the controller software so whether you host it yourself or get the dedicated hardware it's up to you the last pro i want to talk about is stability and this is extremely important to me when it comes to my networking setups every single omada setup that i've deployed and the last couple years has been extremely stable through adding new hardware or through upgrades and i can't say the same about my recent unify setup and if you don't know or you haven't seen my videos i just deployed a bunch of unifi hardware in my home network and so far it's been pretty good but the one downside is that the stability of it hasn't been the greatest from initially trying to adopt products to upgrades kind of taking things offline hasn't been the best yet so that's definitely a point for the omada setup in that regards but mod is not perfect let's talk about the cons here back to the access points now while it was a pro that these mostly have 2.5 gigabit uplinks on them you'd be hard-pressed to find a 2.5 gig compatible switch in the entire omana stack now recently i just saw that they released an 8 port 2.5 gigabit poe switch but i can't buy it anywhere i guess it's not readily available in the united states yet but yeah i really wish that omada would introduce some more 2.5 or 10 gig switches into their lineup i think that's where they're kind of falling short for the entry level into a more sophisticated home network i think they nailed it but when you start to get up into 2.5 in 10 gigabit switching there's really not a lot of options there yet another thing is limited firewall options so like i said you can go with a router like this i think they have maybe one other option but that's kind of it if you are a fancy rack mount system boy then you're not gonna get a giant uh gateway or firewall you're gonna get something like this you're not gonna have built-in storage and that brings me to my next point is that if you wanna implement some type of security system and i know this is a direct comparison to unify where they have their protect line up and you can tie everything back into your gateway or your router and record it directly to there and it's all plays nicely with each other and everything they don't really have that in the omada lineup yet or at least that i know of so if you're watching this video sometime in the future and omad has implemented some type of unify protect competitor then disregard this but if you're looking for a full home network and security system in one you're not going to get that with omada now those cons may or may not be cons to you but they're things that i at least have to mention so overall i do think omada is an amazing product lineup and something that i recommend to nearly everybody who is looking to upgrade their home network into something a little bit more sophisticated and that probably has you wondering why am i running unified then well there's two real reasons one is that i've run omada before i've deployed it a bunch and i like it yes but as a tech youtuber as somebody who makes videos like this i have to have hands-on experience with a lot of different products so the only way i can really do that is to use it myself so i did want to jump in the unifi ecosystem to try it out and see what it's all about because before this i never even laid hands on any unifi hardware so yeah that's one reason and another is that like i mentioned before when it comes to high level switching i don't think omada is there yet i believe unify has a much more robust hardware selection when it comes to higher end switching at the 2.5 gig plus range so that's another reason i went with it because i like to have at least 2.5 running to a lot of my servers and hardware so yeah i mean that's kind of the real reasons i'm not going to bsu or sugarcoat it i still think omad is a great product and just because i'm using something else doesn't mean it's competitor is bad at all and just because i'm using a product doesn't mean it's not the best product for a majority of people i'm not a majority of people trust me so that is my walkthrough on the omada short stack and let me be clear that tp-link did send these products over for me to review however they did not sponsor this video they did not tell me what to say they did not pay me so everything i say is 100 genuine i'm never gonna get up here and bs you guys or try to fluff products up that i haven't personally used or endorse and unless it's a sponsored video the words that are coming out of my mouth are going to be 100 my own so take that for what you will i know it's a slippery slope some people say oh you got products sent to you that means you're a shill it's like you know how many ridiculous products that people try to send me and i turn down because either they're dumb or i've used them before and i don't like them so i do think these are high quality products and if you want to see how i go about setting these up in terms of the software make sure you subscribe because my next video i have coming out we'll be diving into how to configure these and get the most out of your sub 400 sub 300 omada setup so make sure you're around for when that video drops but if you like this video if you like this kind of content drop a like below and if you like content like this at all and you want to see more of my pretty face then please consider subscribing it helps out a ton and i want to give a huge shout out to my youtube members and my patreons you guys are my omada home networking setup i really appreciate you guys i really do it means a lot but if you're still watching if you stuck around through this entire video that's awesome i appreciate you watching thank you so much and i will see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Raid Owl

Views: 66,339

Keywords: networking, omada

Id: DdEcQaS6Gew

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 07 2022