Enterprise Cloud Key Hits EA
Ubiquiti is officially test-launching their Cloud Key Enterprise, a truly massive device that will allow for huge adoptions of Ubiquiti infrastructure without the deployment of bespoke solutions like VMs or bare-metal servers.
The Past of Deploying in Scale
In the past, Ubiquiti didn’t really offer a solution to massive enterprises who needed to control over say three-hundred devices (realistically), but that market wasn’t totally unserved. Airports, hospitals, stadiums, etc., ran their infrastructure through Ubiquiti, so how? Well, admins could establish powerful VMs (virtual machines) or bare metal servers that would run self-hosted UniFi OS on Debian Linux for management. This worked, but was never fully recommended, and presented a lot of risk of mis-configuration causing massive potential problems. Definitely not for the faint of heart.
Enter: Enterprise
Coming to bat then, is Ubiquiti with their official Enterprise solution, the Cloud Key Enterprise. A 550W beast of a server touting the ability to manage over five-thousand devices and fifty-thousand client devices simultaneously. If it proves successful (which I hope it does), then we’ll have a real, supported answer for massive users, and this may prove Ubiquiti’s in-road to more of Cisco’s enterprise market share.
Redundant hot-swappable 550W power supplies, 10G connectivity, Intel XEON 5218, 32GB RAM, SATA SSD - this thing seems capable of meeting their advertised claims, we’ll just have to see how optimized the device is for real life users, and whether or not there’s real interest in the market.
There’s a lot of less-than-excited takes though on forums about it - here’s what I think is the best take:
The assumption here is that this is just the Ubiquiti-branded solution of yester-year, but I have one response, and that’s simply: support. If Ubiquiti is dedicating the same product warranty replacement support that I’ve experienced from them in the past, than even at $5,000, this will be a winner with large organizations. Buying executives interest on a product line goes a long way when they can also know they’re buying next-day replacement of that device pending some disaster. The value of getting business done is extremely high, and people will pay it.
I feel exactly the way this guy does. Is it overpriced? Probably a bit. Is it niche? Absolutely. It might fail. But, if I’m placing myself in the shoes of an individual trying to decide what’s best for their business, and I had an organization with thousands of devices, I would buy this, and I would buy it for one simple reason - it’s officially supported by Ubiquiti.
Expensive, but powerful and officially supported. If I were the decision maker at some massive organization, I’d trust this over some Linux-box my network engineer could put together for managing my x,000 device network. We’ll just have to see if enough of the maket agrees, and it passes Early Access.
