I’m the only IT person for a manufacturing company moving into a new ~100k sq ft building.
Critical areas are the factory floor and a call center, so a switch deciding it needs a random midday reboot is a real problem.
My experience so far is mixed.
We’ve had a couple Netgear PoE switches running phones, APs and cameras for years with basically zero drama.
But I also had an older EdgeSwitch 48 PoE that would occasionally lock up and stop accepting new connections until it was rebooted. RMA’d it once, same story. Having the call center hanging off that thing was not fun.
We already use UniFi APs, so going UniFi for switching would be convenient for central management, backups, updates, etc.
For people running current-gen UniFi PoE switches in production:
Would you trust them for a call center / factory environment?
Any problems with heavier PoE loads like cameras + phones + APs?
And are firmware updates generally safe, or is this still something you only push after hours while crossing your fingers?
every night. Anything obvious I should be checking?
If downtime actually costs money, I wouldn’t design around any switch being “connect and forget”. Stuff fails. The bigger question is what happens when it does.
I run UniFi switching at a few smaller sites and haven’t had random lockups like that. But I also don’t auto-update production gear the second a firmware release appears. Wait a bit, read the release notes, update one non-critical switch first, then schedule the rest.
@nightblade_13N_1 Yeah, auto updates on a call center switch make me nervous. I’d definitely schedule them manually.
Since you’re already redesigning the whole building, I’d also do a proper WiFi plan instead of just dropping APs where the cabling is convenient. Factories can be nasty RF environments once racks and machinery show up. NetSpot is fine for planning/survey work, or Ekahau if you’ve got the budget and need the enterprise workflow. Not really a switch question, but if you’re rebuilding everything anyway, now’s the time. predictive first, validation survey later. Just don’t assume the finished factory will behave exactly like the empty building model.
For what it’s worth, I’d be more worried about being the only IT person supporting a 100k sq ft production site than whether UniFi specifically is reliable enough.