Hey everybody. Clay Archer, CEO, DPC technology. I've got a good one today. Today we're going to check out the unify
UTM Pro Max. So a lot of you probably been seeing the, Pro
Max being teased over the last few weeks. I've been really lucky. unified sent me a prerelease
two prerelease unit so that I could test it out. So I'm not being paid for this review.
But they did send me the units. I appreciate that. And, all the opinions
in this review are my own. but I want to go over the quick headliners
of this unit. I want to show you
a couple of the cool new features, and then I'm going to talk about who
this unit is for. first of all, the big headliner for me
is the price 599. But before we get into that,
let's take a look at what this unit has. It's different than other units. So first of all with the new OS 4.0
you're able to use true shadow mode. So if one unit fails, the other one is able to just take over
and and run in this place. That's an awesome continuity, feature. Second, it has a 2.5 gigabit interface,
which is awesome for those with high speed connections. third, and probably the most important
for it is it is twice the processing power of the previous units,
meaning you were going to be able to add a ton of devices to this unit,
with full DPI and IPS security enabled. It can shoot at 4.3 gigabit per second
versus at 3.5 for the UTM Pro and the EMC. so what does that mean for you? At the end of the day, this is really
just a super powerful, pro or Ummc. This is designed to run a ton of devices
across a large infrastructure. maybe remote multiple site, locations,
even across the entire application suite. and the fourth
kind of obvious upgrade here is that you have two drives for redundancy
on your protect installation. Before I jump into those features
and kind of talk about the use case scenarios
and who I think this device is for, let's take a look at the real party
trick of this system, and we'll look at shadow mode
with automatic failover. so real quick let's jump into the software
here. it's super easy to set this up. And I was amazed at how easy
it was to get this going. first of all, before I set up anything,
I actually just started with a fresh, clean
install on the first UTM Pro Max, all the same interface,
everything looks the same. Obviously we have some new features. I'm not going to go
into every new feature of 8.0. I'm not going to go into every new feature
of 4.0 on the, the firmware. But for the most part,
if you if you use UTM Pro or you've used to do messy, everything's
going to look the same to you. It's very easy. It's very intuitive. Set it up just like normal. So once I had that all set up,
all I had to do was plug the way import on the secondary UTM Pro Max Into any of the land
ports on the first EDM Pro Max. as soon as you do that,
the primary UTM Pro Max sees it and says, do you wish to set it to you shadow mode? You just click the button
and a few minutes later it goes through it and it syncs. Probably took five minutes. Super easy. No big deal. So that's what we've seen to this point. Before we shot mode, but now we go
to the new part that we get in 4.0. let me also say that this is alpha
software that we're testing on here. I had zero bugs, zero glitches, zero
anything. but it may be a little different
in the early release or release software that you see. so what you did
once you had that sync is you click the little button
that said enable automatic failover. And then it kind of walks
you through this four step process. first you it warns you
if you have anything plugged into port seven
on either of the units to remove that. And then you plug a cable from one
to the other on both of their port sevens. So once you plug them together
and you click next, it sets up the high availability cluster
which is step two. Takes them 2 or 3 minutes to do that. Maybe it was more than that. Me
was less now, but it wasn't very long. And then basically once you're done
with that, it prompts you to remove the, the way and cable that you had on the secondary
connected to the land on the primary, and then a plug in a secondary internet
into the wind port on the second device. Well third step in the last step
is to plug them both into your network and boom, it's
done. It's so easy, so quick. and it may sound complicated, but you just basically follow
the instructions on the screen. It took less than ten minutes
and it set up. And now what's awesome is
if either of them fail, the other one just takes over
and it's seamless. It works really well. I'm really impressed with this. you know, how many people
and their whole lives need this? I don't know, that's maybe a little bit
over the scope of a home lab. but if this is a high availability
set that maybe you put in a data center to control multiple sites,
you won't have to worry about that. having multiple wind connections
means that you have fail over there. It really is pretty impressive
the way they've done this. So is that a home use case? Probably not,
unless you're an Uber nerd like me. But the reality of it is in 4.0. It does work, is now seamless. It's all that we thought that could be. Future clay here. I just wanted to go back and cover
a couple of things real quick. one,
the two hard drives that are in the unit, if you have two hard drives
in each of the two units and the first one
fails over to the second one, it would just start recording
on the second drives. In the second unit, you would have to
export those videos or see those videos. from that individual unit. So you have that redundancy of those two,
two units which which may not be perfect, but you would have no gap in the
and the recording. I mean, obviously to have a cut over
gap there, you have one
clip in and another and start. But that would be,
you know, seconds there. but if you wanted to use the same set of drives, you could not
have drives in the secondary unit and then remove the drives. So the primary unit put them in
the secondary unit, have that one run. And if you ever switched them back
switching back again That would keep the recording
to all on those two drives. I think most people would opt for option
A, where you have two drives in each of the two units
you know, when you when you switch over, you would have to go to that unit
to see those, those, those images, but you have the option
either way you want to do there. Obviously it doesn't, record
to both sets of drives all the time. They're on protect. you know, just clarify how that would work
in the case of fail over, if you had to in both drives,
you would have no gap in coverage if you had them in just one of the,
it would only record to that one. So but they are both,
you know, redundant. They're both mirrored, for each unit. So if one drive fails,
neither unit, you'd be fine. Also, I didn't quite cover the, the power
supply redundancy that you have here. If you have a USP RFPs, You will be able to have a power
supply failure in either of these units and just have it keep writing.
That's just another fault tolerance. Another redundancy, item
built into this unit. And then that brings me to support,
which is, you know, a question. I got a ton of in the forums about. And I think this is where unify is really
making a big push in this direction. You saw lately that, unifies. Now offering a support option. And I think that support option
is probably going to roll over to managed service providers. So obviously if you're going to put,
you know, multi thousands of devices on the side
and put it in a data center somewhere, you're going to want to be able
to pick up the phone and call somebody. And so I think unifies working
really hard to make that be a reality. they've already rolled that service
out in the USA Canada. And I think you're going to see that service roll out in further countries
throughout the world. So 24 hour 365 technical support
is obviously what you're going to need if you're going to offer this
as a service provider. So, with that,
let's jump back into the video. that brings me back to kind of
who is this device for? You know, the high speed when fail over,
the more processing power. I mean, I don't know that a lot of people
that have that are using YouTube at home are going, man,
I wish I had more processing power. because you're probably only running, you know, a couple hundred devices, maybe
less, probably 50 devices in your home. But if you get to the spots
where, you know, an enterprise level equipment is probably not necessary,
but you are running multiple hundreds of devices
over multiple locations. I think that's where this device is
kind of headed. so who is this device for
and is it for you. Well, you know obviously you know the biggest questions I think that you're going to get out there
at least the what I saw on online was, hey, there's no ether lighting,
there's no 2.5 gig lan or or ten gig lan
or there's no Poe on the Liam. I think this device is not intended
for anybody that would have the need
for those in a ports. So, you know, the people
that are going to buy this are going to have already have
switching. are you going to have Poe. They're already going to have
those things. the reason that they went
with some redundancy on the hard drives in the front of it typically, you know,
you're going to be running ten, 15, you know, more cameras than eight
ports were ever going to need you. So putting Poe on it
or putting 2.5 or putting, you know, whatever you're going to put
there was probably overkill. most people are going to connect this over
ten gig SFP plus to another switch. So I think they chose not to put that that level of switching in it
just to save cost there. And that brings me
back to their 599 price. I think this device is starting
to step into the MSP space you know, this is going to be an organization
that's got a ton of devices They want the security features
of a higher end firewall, but maybe they're not ready
to just take a step into like a meraki or a sonicwall name one of the other channel
partner devices there. And at 599, I think there's that
there is definitely going to be a use case where this works. Well, obviously you're going to get
the rapid v end deployment. You're going to get single sign on. If you're going to use something like UID. I think that is the market
they're going for. And I think that this is going to be
a pretty successful device in that market. I also think the high end home enthusiasts
that just wants this, that the best, fastest, that may have
some need for 2.5 gigabit internet. I do think the the Uber nerd army will have this, you know, 599 versus 4.99. Hey, just give me all the bells
and whistles. I've already got the the switching. I don't need that stuff. And, you know, that begs
the question of where is how is unified going to get in that space? you know, I can see that they are putting
more emphasis into unify site manager, which is great because I have a feeling
if you're going in that space that you're going to want to be able
to deploy these devices really quickly from a single pane of glass,
there's a joke at DPC technology where MSP whenever somebody says single pane glass,
you have to drink, But I do feel like unify
is a unique position where their interface looks good, and I think it's really easy
for people to adopt. I think the end user that sees
the other end of the interface likes the way that unifies stuff looks. so I think there's a big
there's a big uptick there. I was, watching a Tom Morris podcast. Shout out to Tom.
I'm sure he's doing a review of this. but the big cost for an MSP to deploy something like
this is the usability in the training and the, the ease of use for your
both your staff and for the end user. And I think unify is in a unique position
where if they can get a lot of these pieces online, they could
make some real waves in the community. That being said, there's a ways to go. You know, I think this is a step
in the right direction. some more global management
stuff would be great. A lot of the,
you know, I put it up in the, in the MSP forums, a lot of the MSPs
were worried about security. honestly over the last 12 to 24 months, I think they've made
huge strides on their security. I think they'd be few strides on the VPN. they're coming out with updates
to the OS to unify network, to unify, protect like on a weekly monthly
basis now. And they are they're big updates
and they're they're doing it rapidly. So I think there's some momentum
behind it. How are they there yet? I don't know I don't think
that they're quite there yet. I'm not ready to jump ship
and put all of my clients on there. obviously if you're, you know,
in the health care or, or, you know, you have some high regulatory
requirements, you're going to be really cautious
making that move. But I do think that somebody that,
you know, if if you're doing it for a big landscape company
and they want to put in, you know, a couple of years
to run all their locations, I think this is going to be a device that's going to end up being in use
in those locations quite a bit. ultimately for me, I'm probably
going to throw this up in our data center and put a couple of,
weird connections to it, to power to it. There'll be a big, huge cloud controller. It could run multiple sites. I think there's something to be said for,
kind of the broad spectrum of how this is going to be used. And I'm really interested to see
where ubiquity takes this going forward. a lot of the feedback I got in
the forums was about, availability It seems like the latest, greatest stuff
from unify is a bit hard to get. And, but,
you know, I haven't felt the same about. wireless access points and switches. obviously, if you're trying to get them the first day they come out,
that's been difficult. You know, we put a ton of these products,
especially switches and webs, you know, on in our clients offices. And we don't really have
that much of trouble, with getting them. But that is something
that unify is going to have to address the MSP community
if they're going to go direct, but there is a huge road to unify
and that they have that going to a subscription model
on pretty much anything, which, you know,
that's a double edged sword. but you know what? You're kidding. For a one time fee, 599 for a router of
this capability is pretty amazing. If you are in a meraki or Sonicwall or,
insert name here, it would be, you know, a double that triple
that maybe fought three times out. Four times out. So those are huge advantages for Unifi. you know, I think there needs to be
some more development in this path. I'm really excited about where it's
where it's headed. the other thing about the price of this
and not having the subscription model, if you took that monthly subscription that
you were paying to those other vendors and you put it into endpoint stuff like,
you know, EDR or MDR or CIM or, you know, that kind of stuff, I think that may be
a better use of those funds and ultimately probably offer
more protection. you know, I digressed there. I mean,
everybody's got their own opinion there, But I definitely think that that's something worth considering
or at least having the discussion about. So anyways, if you have any comments,
I'm sure you will please put them in the comments down
below. If you want me to test
anything else out with this unit. I mean, I've barely scratched the surface. I'm sure there's going to be a bunch of YouTube videos on this,
and if you have any comments about, unifying the MSP space, I think that's
a really interesting conversation. I, you know, I think that the space
could use a provider like unify. Please like and subscribe. we also have an affiliate
link down below. If you want to purchase
one of these units, We love you to use. That definitely helps out the channel. Thank you for unify again
for sending the units. If you like videos like this we do them weekly
and we'll see you guys in the next video.
