I'm glad to see UBNT in this space.
I've always used ZFS because it's vastly superior to other options. When I see storage companies building without fault tolerance, or without a merkle tree (so that you can backup deltas efficiently without having to recompute them) it's a sign their marketing team has more influence over the company than their engineers.
Sadly, the few ZFS COTS options have been somewhat underpowered. QNAP supports ZFS filesystems, but their backup configuration won't let you arrange for a nas to pull from the source (instead of the source doing a push.) You can still pull it off by scheduling your own cron job, but this somewhat defeats the purpose of paying extra for a vendor solution.
UBNT is still supporting my 15 year old edgerouters with security updates, and their interface is clean and usable for anyone with basic network experience. And their video surveillance solutions are unusual in that they allow you to keep your footage entirely onsite and offline, an uncommon level of privacy. If they can bring the same polish to their storage solutions, I'll be using these new products for a long time.
The same is true for our AI processing on the cameras. This is entirely local and private. You can even air gap the UniFi Protect system from the Internet and it'll operate fine.
> This is entirely local and private. You can even air gap the UniFi Protect system from the Internet and it'll operate fine.
One week ago 3 guys broke into my shop while I was traveling. They had sense enough to power down the starlink that was providing internet which would have taken out all of the remote camera options.
They did not realize that almost everything they were doing was being recorded via the unifi system. In the end about the only thing of value left in the building was the hard drive with all of their pictures on it.
The police have used the footage to identify all of them and it will be pretty open and shut when they see a court room. Offline and air gapped the whole time they were there but did exactly what it was installed to do.
The processing can happen within the camera, and it's nice when it does...but that doesn't mean that the only other option is something cloud-based, like some might assume.
Open-source NVR software like Frigate can do things like the object-detection/license plate/face recognition game on local hardware, with the cheapest available IP cameras. It's just a program that runs on a computer with a network and some storage and some processing ability like a GPU.
Those cheap cameras don't have to be trusted; with things like VLANs, they can hang out on the Group W bench where they have no access to anything important or the outside world. :)
(But yeah, it does represent much more of a DIY effort than something from UBNT does.)
I do like the onboard AI, and it works well for entity detection (like people). We haven't found the face detection to be very reliable in outdoor security applications. There doesn't seem to be a way to correct/combine classes if someone's detected as multiple individuals on different occasions, so we end up with the same person detected as 5 "unknown"s. This is not a hard problem to solve. You'd just allow embedding matching to different face groups, but it's annoying as a user.
The cost is just insane though. $4-$500 for a camera that I can get equivalent specs for $50-100.
IME those sub-$100 Chinese IP cameras have you at the mercy of whatever firmware they cut from the master branch the week they shipped it. People don't buy UI because they win on specs-per-dollar. They buy it because they win on results-per-dollar.
With face detection? License plates? Tamper protection?
I'm guessing you're thinking Reolink or other Chinese ultra-commodity cam. It's fine, it's just in a different product class and ecosystem - and that's where enterprises fit in, they want that support+ecosystem and not DIYing.
Reolink CX820 8MP $129 https://reolink.com/product/cx820/
Unifi G6 8MP ~$300 https://techspecs.ui.com/unifi/physical-security/uvc-g6-dome...
Avigilon H6A 8MP ~$1200 https://www.avigilon.com/security-cameras/h6a-dome
> With face detection? License plates? Tamper protection?
I do that with my Unifi Protect doorbell. RTSP streams. Google Coral. Frigate. Scales very well. Do ML on low quality stream. Look/save the high quality stream. You do it all centralized, and you can put the camera(s) on a seperate VLAN. They don't even need internet access. If you run them over PoE twisted pair, the attacker would need physical access to perform MITM. Wireless, one should assume the camera is insecure (e.g. KRACK).
Wow, that's cool, learned something new today. Does that work better in your estimation than the UI Protect software?
The purpose of my comment had only been pointing out those features don't come onboard a $100 cam.
I never really thought of Ubiquity as enterprise always felt more of the premium small to mid sized business but I am sure some enterprises use them.
The new enterprise NVRs work pretty well.
I think they're definitely not Avigilon, Genetec, Verkada, but we run a few hundred UI cams in some edge areas. It works, esp if you don't demand orchestration.
They're not all $500, some are $150-300. Overall price comparable to Honeywell, but more than, say, Lorex.
All the basic G6 cameras are in the $200 range and have edge compute?
What's the comparison at $50-100?
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Can I use it without running some inane management VM?
The UDM runs mine, but prior to that I ran a Docker container with it. It worked well.
https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/unifi-controller
Genuine question, if you're running unifi, why don't you want the management vm? Synology makes a decent NAS without the controller.
Synology hardware stopped being decent a while ago.
Plus their drive type restrictions which are poison in a cost-sensitive NAS.
(Seemingly rolled back recently, but a roll back can be easily rolled back itself. I don't trust them enough to count on that not happening.)
I like the hardware, cannot stand needing to run another machine just for management.
If you get one of the Cloud devices, you won't need to, as they bring their own.
> QNAP supports ZFS filesystems
Do they have ecc on those models? Do you have an example model on hand?
ECC support depends on the processors that the NAS uses. A few of their NASes allow you to use ECC memory but you'd need to swap the memory installed to ECC memory. A lot of their systems use Intel cpus that don't support ECC at all so you need to carefully pick and choose.
Some do. I got the TS-873A a few years back, it works. Their software is kind of weird, and I wouldn't connect it to their cloud offering, but it does work.
What's UBNT?
Stock symbol for Ubquiti, the company being discussed.
The stock symbol for Ubiquiti is actually UI, not UBNT. UBNT was the symbol for the old name that hasn't been used since 2019. I have no idea why changing the name also changed the stock symbol, but shrug
Thanks, I think. I usually write UBNT because it's distinct and spelling out "Ubiquiti" hurts my soul in ways that I find difficult to properly articulate.
But UI just seems so ambiguous. :)
Thanks. I wish people could just say the company name instead of using random aliases, but I guess it's some sort of cultural thing.
Ubiquity Networks Inc.