Enterprise Market in Sight: Ubiquiti Networks with New Core Switch

With a new core switch offering up to 3.2 Tbit/s system performance, Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation, and new access switches with MACsec and increased stack bandwidth, the manufacturer Ubiquiti Networks is now clearly targeting the enterprise market. What is exciting is that the system continues to incur no recurring license costs, unlike many competitors today. Continue after ad With the new Enterprise Campus Switch Core (ECS-Core) featuring 32x100G QSFP28 slots, the manufacturer is now entering new performance tiers. It offers up to 3.2 Tbit/s non-blocking performance and large MAC tables with up to 128,000 MAC addresses. The manufacturer thus seems to assume that customers want to build large switched networks, which is also supported by the introduction of Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation for Layer 2 redundancy across two chassis. For routing, it only allows 256 static IPv4 routes, which may be too few in many enterprise environments. Also, 512 entries in access lists could quickly lead to bottlenecks. The manufacturer has not yet provided any information on dynamic routing and advanced QoS mechanisms, as are typically used in the campus core, nor on IPv6. As is customary in this class, it offers redundant power supplies and fans that are hot-swappable. A small 1.3-inch display can be used for a quick glance at port status. The manufacturer made no statements regarding prices. Improved scaling in aggregation/distribution In the area of aggregation switches, the MC-LAG concept has been completely revised according to the manufacturer for improved availability, and Rapid Spanning Tree convergence times under load have also been optimized. Furthermore, the MAC address tables have been expanded in this segment for greater scalability. Ubiquiti has not yet provided more precise details. New Access Switch There is also a lot happening in the access switch environment. The new Enterprise Campus 48S PoE switch (ECS-48S-PoE) offers 32x mGig copper ports with up to 2.5G and 16x mGig copper ports with up to 10G. All ports offer PoE up to 90 Watts. It also provides 2x100G QSFP28 backplane stacking ports and 4xSFP28 25G ports as uplinks. Additionally, it now brings hardware-accelerated MACsec encryption and support for cross-stack LACP bundles. It also offers 32,000 MAC entries and 512 static IPv4 routes, as well as 256 access list entries (ACL entries). For true micro-segmentation at the access layer, the number of ACL entries may be too low. With two power supplies, it offers 2,150 Watts of PoE power in distributed mode or 950 Watts in redundant mode. Again, the manufacturer made no statements regarding prices. Continue after ad Beyond hardware, there are also some innovations. Monitoring of optical connections now allows early detection of whether a transceiver or a fiber optic link is faulty, which has been standard with competitors for many years. However, the digital twin of the network is likely to be of interest. It is intended to improve visibility and clearly indicate fault locations. How this works in practice remains to be seen. With Time Machine, the manufacturer aims to display historical network data to identify deviations from the baseline in the event of errors. (mho)