UniFi SmartPower USP-PDU-Pro - Complete Overview!

just released out of Early Access is one of the first devices in ubiquity's smart power lineup of products the power distribution professional otherwise known as the pdu pro now normally this is the part of the video where I do an unboxing of the product and all of that nonsense but I've actually had the pdu pro in use since February of this year it's been the power backbone of the test Network rack that you see right here behind me but now that it's out of va we can finally talk about it the pdu pro or model USP pdu Pro to be more specific has an MSRP of 279 dollars before we get into the specifics of this particular pdu let's first talk about why a pdu or power distribution unit is important for your network rack a pdu is essentially a power strip on steroids it takes a single power outlet and expands that out to power up multiple devices as it relates to computer networking app TDU typically also has a form factor that's friendly to network racks either a 1u or 2u horizontal form factor or a vertical form factor that would typically be installed on the back side of a full-sized rack in the case of the pdu pro it's a 2u rack mountable device that's designed to be placed either in the front or the back of a network rack as you can see in my installation I opted to have it in the back of the rack Beyond Distributing power to multiple devices and having a network rack friendly form factor pdus usually have some level of surge protection or power conditioning to enable that clean even power is distributed to your devices and that they're protected from Power surges and spikes the USP pdu Pro does all of that and it allows you to configure the individual power ports in unify Network it's also hiding some extra surprises that we're going to talk about in this video as well the pdu pro has a total of 16 125v volt AC 15 amp max power outlets for a total of 1875 Watts maximum capacity 12 of these power outlets are oriented horizontally across the top and four of them are oriented vertically spaced out across the bottom one U of the pdu pro these four are good for larger power bricks that take up extra space it also features four USB type-c ports with a maximum of 2 amps per port or a maximum of 4 amps or 20 watts total power budget across all four USB ports the USB type-c ports can be used for any number of USBC powered devices such as the G4 doorbell Pro the G4 instant camera or even just charging your smartphone the front of the pdu pro also features a circuit breaker as well as the same 1.3 inch touchscreen that we see on many of the unify enabled devices in ubiquiti's lineup the 1.3 inch touchscreen display allows you to see network and power consumption stats for each port in the device as well as display information such as the IP address and network status now let's talk about the four Network ports on the pdu pro one of the network ports is a fast ethernet port and the other three are gigabit two in the front as well as one in the back but why do we need four Network ports at all on a pdu the fast ethernet port is easy that's the pdu's own connection to the Lan as well as how it reports its status to unify network but the other three ports are pretty interesting ubiquity has decided to use the pdu as a redundant Wan distribution device in addition to all of its other power capabilities if you look at the pdu Pro's installation guide there are two types of setup for this device type A is really simple you take the pdu pros fast ethernet port and you plug it into the network Bob's your uncle you're done with the installation but installation type B showcases a more redundant setup where the pdu pro takes your ISP Wan connection into the gigabit Network Port labeled ISP that's on the back of the device and then splits that internet connection out into two separate dream machine Pros now I assume that this works the same if it's two udm Pros or two udmscs but I'm not sure which other devices may be compatible with this type of redundant router setup then each of the udm pros has a fiber connection over to the switch Pro aggregation which then distributes out to a 48 Port switch and then finally into the fast ethernet port on the pdu pro so this is really cool right I mean we are finally getting to a point where UniFi is going to be supporting redundant firewalls like a real Enterprise router slash firewall solution right the problem is that it doesn't seem like the software has yet caught up to the hardware now this may just be an early access thing which I'm really not technically supposed to be talking about but I'm currently running unify OS version 1.12.24 with unify Network version 7.2.93 which as far as I know is the latest versions of both of those sets of software I'm not seeing anything in the pdu Pro to indicate that any network ports besides the fast ethernet port even exist I mean if you look at the device View and unify you can only see one network Port none of those Wan ports are showing up in unify at all additionally I have my pdu Pro wired up so that my ISP connection terminates into the ISP port on the back of the device and then comes out the front on Port 22 and into my udm Pro this is actually working fine as I do have internet access and network activity on the port on the udm pro but there's no indication whatsoever of network activity on Wan Port 22 of the pdu pro so what are my thoughts on this I personally I think it's great that this feature is coming and I look forward to a day when I can make a video on an aha set of udm pro firewalls but it doesn't seem to be a reality just yet the software hasn't caught up to the point where this is supported and I'm on Early Access software in my test Network all right so enough of the overview let's actually take a look at the pdu pro in unify to see its capabilities as of the latest version here we can see the pdu pro in the devices view of unified network if I click on the pdu pro we get an overview which tells us the device version IP address model Mac address uptime Etc we can also see some statistics about the power usage we can see right now it's at 90.4 watts and it's pulling 1.06 amps if we look at the Uplink we can see that the fast ethernet port is connected to the udm pro complete setup that is the name of my udm Pro but notice that we don't see any of those Wan ports that's what I was talking about previously if we click on insights we can see total power utilization in Watts I'm just barely using a fraction of this device while I'm recording this video but it actually is running a decent amount of equipment I've got my qnap qgd 1600 on here I've got a 24 Port switch the udm pro as well as the usw Enterprise 24 Poe as well as some miscellaneous like a flex camera and a G4 instant camera that I have plugged into one of the USB ports so it's got a number of the ports the power ports already used up but again it's just a lot of sort of low power draw devices it's only pulling a total of 91.49 Watts if I click on settings here we can see every single individual power port and we can see the one fast ethernet port and I keep reiterating this but again we don't see a view of any of those Wan ports that are featured on this pdu Pro if we click on any of the individual Outlets we can see that per Outlet we can not only name it so that we know what's actually plugged into that device but for instance you can see my rack fans here the rack fans on top of this network rack are super super loud so I do have them plugged into the pdu pro I just have them set to disabled so when I first turn on the entire rack they fire up and they sound like an aircraft taken off of an aircraft carrier and then as soon as the pdu Pro Connects unify it sees that that port's supposed to be disabled and it shuts those off but on a per Port basis we can also see how much power is being used by each device so for instance it looks like my qnap qgd 1600 is taking up the most power if I click on any individual Port we can turn the power on and off for this particular Port we can click the button down here to just power cycle that port and then we have a really interesting feature we have modem power cycle this basically means if the udm pro detects an internet outage it knows that your modem is plugged into a specific port on the pdu pro and as an attempt to sort of self-heal from an internet outage it will power cycle whatever ports you have labeled as modem power cycle the idea being here that oftentimes a reboot of an isp's modem can fix an internet outage and that's usually the first thing the ISP has you try when you're troubleshooting regardless so this kind of just does that for you if an internet outage is detected it reboots the isp's modem automatically hopefully bringing that internet connection back other than the per Outlet setting we have some settings for the 1.3 inch touchscreen display we have services such as what management VLAN is managing this device as well as s m p details if you want to add those for network monitoring as well as Network so it's DHCP on mine but you can choose to give this pdu Pro a static IP address if you want and then of course we have all of the usual unified Network management options such as updating rebooting locating for getting the device out of unify all that sort of good stuff so there you have it a first look at the USP pdu Pro for unify now we get to the part of the video where I talk about how I feel this device can be improved first of course and most obvious the software needs to catch up with the hardware I would love to be able to show off the pdu pro splitting out a single Wan connection into two udm Pros now I'm sure that's coming I just don't know when and I have no crystal ball into the inner workings of ubiquity beside besides that though I think this pu is pretty feature Rich I like that each outlet can be controlled individually I like the modem reboot functionality one thing I would like to see is time groups and they may be great if you could set up groups of time that would allow you to schedule power on and off for each individual Outlet now this is a really dumb example but like I have these LED lights that are running around my network rack it'd be great if I could schedule it so that the LEDs were only on during business hours and then if the pdu managed that power schedule I mean there's obviously a thousand better use cases for that specific feature but you guys get what I mean aesthetically the pdu pro is going to be a great complement to any unify heavy Network rack it looks great and as far as pricing goes the 279 dollar price tag really isn't that bad when you compare it to other 1u and 2u rack mountable pdus from companies like cyberpower or APC that being said if you guys know of a comparably priced PD you that is as feature Rich as this pdu Pro please let me know down in the comments below I'd love to take a look at some of the comparable competitors one more thing I should mention is that there are a few other devices in the smart power lineup of products that are still in Early Access so I can't really talk about them but I urge you to go check those out in ubiquiti's Early Access store so you can get a clearer picture of where ubiquity is going with all of these new products all right that's going to do it for this video and I will absolutely follow up with more information about the udm pro redundant setup in the future so be sure to like And subscribe to crosstalk solutions for two to three brand new tech videos every single week alright thank you guys so much for watching and we will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 80,827

Keywords: USP-PDU-Pro, PDU-Pro, UniFi PDU-Pro, unifi smart power plug, smart home, network rack assembly, power distribution professional, unifi power distribution professional, unifi PDU, unify, unifi power strip, pdu-pro setup, crosstalk, crosstalk solutions

Id: TQgfz4WhmJA

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2022