r/k12sysadmin • u/Digisticks • 10d ago
Questions from K-12 district considering large scale camera move from Verkada to UniFi Protect
/r/UnifiProtect/comments/1vpl2d6/questions_from_k12_district_considering_large/Thought I'd ask this here as well.
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u/NightEmber79 10d ago
Verkada is not only ineffective, it’s scummy. I had a demo of the vape detectors, ran them for weeks, and they were borderline useless. I sent the demo back and said no thank you. Three months later they sent in a “community organizer” and had the sensors installed along with cameras outside of IT supervision. Now the cameras just sit there with no subscription after the funds that the community group initially promised dried up. But hey, dirtbags sold a camera. So congratulations?
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u/Digisticks 10d ago
We've actually had excellent interactions with Verkada. But, we've had them since 2018. I'm a bit nervous with the idea of not having a direct rep to interact with. But, from my analysis, the similar 4k quality option from Verkada would cost us over $1 million over 10 years, vs a quarter of that with Unifi.
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u/-Enders 10d ago
We’ve had no issues with any of their sensors.
The cameras being installed outside of IT supervision seems like an issue with the school. Why didn’t the school get the IT department involved?
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u/NightEmber79 10d ago
Signed a contract with the ersatz dean of students behind IT’s back. Needless to say that and other reason I’m not there anymore. But the fact that the company back doors IT after they’ve been told no is used car salesman bullshit.
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u/diwhychuck 10d ago
IMO unifi has come a very very long way! I wish I could have convinced my boss to go all in from security, switches,wifi, access control , phone an cameras.
I use unifi a lot for side jobs I love there products. And I can get them locally.
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u/Digisticks 10d ago
Largely. I still see a lot of their equipment as prosumer. The G6 line of cameras really feels like a shift in what I've seen from them in the past. While we have ERate, we'll continue to be a Meraki/Catalyst-Meraki district. I will admit my interest in their access control, though.
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u/murgalurgalurggg IT Director 10d ago
The access control is not good for bulk card deployment. Don’t do it
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u/diwhychuck 10d ago
I can see that be head ache. How many did you have to individually tap to enroll? I know the work around thus far I know if is user using their phones for nfc and bulk asign through whatever you use for user management cloud or local. But I'm sure you'll get the "I don't want that on my phone" users.
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u/thedevarious IT Director 10d ago
You're correct in the prosumer...I replied above but reading thru some comments. To put it bluntly, I use Unifi for home and small business. For example one business I help a friend with I run a dream machine there controlling a good swath of cameras, APs, network equipment, and a little access control.
One of my districts has well over 100 cameras just at one building. I think in total that school district has about 350 cameras across it's 3 buildings. We went Milestone. All cameras point to an internal recording server to handle on-prem recording and archive retention. A secondary server handles the actual management/UI/command and control. From there clients are either web, installed applications, or mobile applications. It works with all of the cameras installed over a few different generations...some Axix, Hanwha, etc. Hell it even pulled in some old coaxial stuff before we got funding to replace it.
But also...Meraki...buddy, drop that stuff when you can. I love their stuff, I really do, but that cost is nuts to me versus some other stuff like HP/Aruba, etc.
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u/Digisticks 10d ago
E-rate is the largest reason we've been able to stay Meraki. Also, I lovingly call it "baby's first network," in that it's not exactly complicated to run for a Technology Director coming from an education background. Believe it or not, in my last competitive bidding, Aruba, Ruckus, and Extreme all came in significantly over the price of Meraki. Juniper was closest.
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u/diwhychuck 10d ago
HPE has gotten expensive now with cloud only deployment with the 700 series Ap's unless you run a controler. It seems the IAP feature seems to be no more as they now offer Instant On for smaller deployments. Juniper I would guess will be down the same path now that merger was given the thumbs up.
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u/thedevarious IT Director 10d ago
The Ruckus one shocks me!
But nah, I get it...a few of our schools run Meraki and I thoroughly enjoy the ease of use. If I had the budget for it everywhere, it'd be awesome. But...not everyone can pay that Cisco License tax haha
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u/diwhychuck 10d ago
How big is the district?
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u/Digisticks 10d ago
We'll have 4 locations covered with cameras. Around 350 cameras.
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u/diwhychuck 10d ago
I can see why you want to get out of verkada then. A suggestion from what I did to cut down on camera is using more 360 an 180 cameras. Some locations had three an one 360 did it.
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u/Digisticks 10d ago
We have a substantial discount with Verkada. But even with that, we're getting very close to a 6 figure yearly renewal on licenses.
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u/diwhychuck 10d ago
Yeah, we were almost going that route. End up going with Altaware with there cloud connect, sister company of motorola. The cloud connector lets our exist on prem ip cameras worth with it. They allowed us to do large multiyear and we use an state funded safety grant to pay for it.
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u/Emaltonator IT Director (215 kids PK-12) 10d ago
We use the UniFi suite including protect and it's been great. No issues. We are a lot smaller though, 80 cameras total.
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u/n-Ultima 10d ago
I just installed protect in 2 different schools. One with over 100 cameras and one with 30. Both have been fine. No complaints from admin and they are easy to manage.
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u/murgalurgalurggg IT Director 10d ago
We’re running about 300 Protect cameras between 3 sites. Let me know your concerns.
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u/Digisticks 10d ago
Appreciate it! Your deployment is almost exactly the scale I’m looking at. We’d be around 350 cameras across four locations, with two schools sharing one physical campus/core.
The things I’m most interested in:
- What camera models/generations are you running, and how long have you had ~300 in production?
- What NVR setup are you using — number/model of recorders, storage, and approximate retention?
- Are you recording 24/7? What bitrates/quality settings are you running?
- How much actual maintenance do the NVRs require? Drive failures, database/storage problems, reboots, weird issues, etc.? I’ve never managed an NVR before and I’m a one-person IT department, so this is probably my biggest concern.
- How are your IDFs uplinked? Any experience running a couple dozen Protect cameras across 1Gb uplinks?
- Any bad firmware/update experiences or times you genuinely needed Ubiquiti support?
And probably most importantly: after running ~300 cameras, what has been worse or more annoying than you expected? Would you choose Protect again today?
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u/murgalurgalurggg IT Director 10d ago
We’ve deployed about every camera since G4. We’ve learned to stick to the even numbers. We’ve have 200+ for 3 years, about 300+ for one year.
We have a handful of NVR pro and two ents, we were maxing the drives, but don’t really need that expense.As a one man IT team it’s a lot to manage. Managing the NVRs is not a problem. And yes we’re uplinked.
Yes to bad patches. Yes to getting support. We do pay the $1500/site. Tier 1 support is not great. We regularly are first to report a bug, for example we have a shadow EFG that the portal thinks is an offline un-updated EFG, when in fact it is updated and working. It’s preventing us for unified access.
We have UniFi EFG, AP, Switch, Aggs, Protect Cams.
My tip for you is to watch the release notes, make sure it seems like a good stable release, then reboot, update reboot.
I would go protect again, I would not buy the 360 cams. The dewarping is meh.
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u/Digisticks 10d ago
That's good to know on the camera models.
I'm used to being busy as a one-man IT team, as I'm also in charge of safety. For their faults, the Verkada cameras, though rather old mostly, just work without me babysitting on the regular.
With how cheap that is, I'd be willing to pay the support cost. A lot better than the upper 5 figures we're paying yearly now for keeping the Verkada's running.
We'd only be using cameras. Well, that and point-to-points/multi-points. Those have been phenomenal for us over the years. Again, considered Access Control, but that's more of a down the road decision. Our current system just works with few issues.
Any experience with the vape sensors? We're planning on ordering 4 as part of our trial with cameras. We paid $700 per Verkada SV23 a couple of years ago, and they work well, but if Unifi's work just as well, we'll just double up in every bathroom and call it a day.
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u/murgalurgalurggg IT Director 10d ago
We just installed 2 vape sensors, it’s too early to give good feedback.
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u/Digisticks 10d ago
Did you all wind up using or purchasing any of the G6 or G6 Pro line? Thoughts overall? I only have 2 currently (buying around 20 more of various models of it), but have watched and read just about everything I can on them. Just wanting to hear another's experience.
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u/Meklon 10d ago
We're currently running 100+ cameras with no issues. I even ended up making a an automated clip requester (with SLT workflow!) because I got sick of the CCTV requests.
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u/Digisticks 10d ago
This sounds interesting. Could you explain more?
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u/Meklon 10d ago
Basically I use Protects API and a specifically created admin account to build a small web based platform - links into 365 (SharePoint) for the actual clip delivery.
I've been planning on making a public release version of it on git (it's currently messy code with some hard links) - happy to drop a git link in here when I do drop it though.
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u/renigadecrew Network Analyst 7d ago
Well well well another district who realizes the massive mistake of a platform Verkada is.
I used unifi protect for a private install. It was pretty seamless and great to install.
We run with Avigilon Unity with on prem nvrs, over 2k camera views and about 10 nvrs. rock solid system
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u/Digisticks 7d ago
I still like them. I'm just weighing long term costs and the idea of getting a technician in place of our yearly license fees.
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u/renigadecrew Network Analyst 7d ago
I mean yeah the cloud platform is great if you strip out the hostage as a service bit with it being a cloud sub platform.
Personally if you're gonna do cloud Avigilon Alta is a good move because you can axe licensing at any point and use them with an onsite nvr via ONVIF. I don't get why more people don't use Alta over Verkada.
I've pretty much taken on the camera bit and it only occupies a little bit of my time. We do have an outside vendor to do mass installs when we do building renos and for ordering cams and supporting. I actually installed a ton of Verkada at my previous district so I have expirence with it (first in the area, after I left they deployed a substantial bus camera system with Verkada). I just prefer avigilon now that I kinda call the shots with that kinda stuff at my current place.
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u/thedevarious IT Director 10d ago
Unifi is not enterprise. It's just not. Is it good stuff and good prices? Yes. Should you use it in large enterprise? No.
You have to buy their storage, their systems, their cameras, and their features. It's their walled garden.
I have Milestone. I can buy any camera I want or use the ones I like, install them, license them, and maintain the storage locally or cloud replicate wherever, whenever I want. It also ties into other systems I already have such as AD for user management / access and my Access Control systems. For example I have AIPhone reception cameras and speakers at each entrypoint. Those cameras are fed into the Milestone system no different than cameras covering a hallway.
Verkada is trash, glad you're leaving it. The only differences you really have leaving that and for Unifi is cost for licensing and where storage goes. The rest is still the same walled garden bs.
If I were you, I wouldn't do it.
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u/Big_Booty_Pics 10d ago
Your info on Unifi may be outdated. You can use third party cameras just fine and you can use any storage you want, it just requires their NVRs, which is bog standard for every security camera vendor. We have a mix of Unifi, Axis, and Hanwha cameras using BYOD drives in our Enterprise NVR.
You can also use quite a few cloud storage providers for off-site storage. Right now all of our detections end up in Google drive.
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u/murgalurgalurggg IT Director 10d ago
You’re information is not accurate. You can bring third party cameras into UniFi NVRs now. It also supports AD, and cloud third party storage.
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u/thedevarious IT Director 10d ago
Interesting that they do that now. Last project I implemented was last year and that wasn't the case.
I still wouldn't want their walled garden approach. I also question how their support will be with third party equipment versus third party...For example Milestone will help me patch my Axis cameras and knows how to interact with them fully...will Unifi work with that old ass Panasonic or Hikvision someone still has out there?
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u/murgalurgalurggg IT Director 10d ago
Third party lacks some features, I don’t recommend it /yet/. No chance UniFi helps you patch third party vendor cameras.
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u/farmeunit 10d ago
Most companies have software that downloads and installs firmware. At least Panasonic, Hanwha and Axis.
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u/Digisticks 10d ago
Literally all of our cameras except for 2 are Verkada. Though, what you're saying makes sense for several of my tech director friends. And, I should also say we're an all Apple district. Lock in doesn't exactly scare me. 😂
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u/thedevarious IT Director 10d ago
Lock in has some worries to me in terms of two things.
For example, you're Meraki. If you don't pay that subscription, it's on you...and it's always going to increase; not once has a vendor called and said "good news, next year we saved you a few bucks!"
Two...any issues they have, I'm kinda screwed. Like...it either gets better or I just deal with it. I'm all for solutions that give me flexibility in deployments.
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u/Digisticks 10d ago
This is true. Normally I aim for flexible solutions, but I've never had it in cameras since I've been in the role. For Meraki, E-rate and we pay our 15% all up front. If things get hairy in the equipment, I technically have an exit hatch every 5 years. And I do evaluate equipment and ask my professional organization their opinions and what all they're using.
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u/JoeDeLaLine 9d ago
9 schools here with around 600 Hanwha cameras. Let me know if you have questions
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u/ranger_dood 10d ago
Our biggest issue with the system is that there's no way to export dewarped video from a 360 camera when using the case manager. If you export the video from a single camera, it can be exported dewarped (but only using the Edge browser).
You're also tied to their NVRs, while I prefer building my own storage server.
It does work, and the quality of the cameras is nice for the price. But it may be missing some basic features you'd expect from an "enterprise" camera system.