A hands on first look at the NET UX1000 Gateway and Survivable Branch Appliance for #Lync

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Update 20/3/2012: Official data sheet from net: here

Concurrent calls:

• A range of I/O and call capacities (4 to 84 concurrent connections between VoIP and PSTN/analog endpoints) to optimize branch office costs.
• Support for up to 45 IP to IP calls

Hands on with an NET UX1000 Apha unit.

Full Disclosure: I don’t have any particular relationship to NET, but have used a number of their gateways in Lync deployments, and I do like their kit

The NET UX2000 is a tried and tested modular gateway and Survivable Branch Appliance for Lync, but at up to 6 DSP’s (600 simultaneous transcoded calls) and up to 16 T1/E1 spans and core i7 server module for the Lync Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) it’s great for a bigger deployment, but struggles to be the most cost effective option on a smaller deployment or Branch.

NET have responded to this challenge with the NET UX1000. At the moment there are only 5 Alpha units in existence and I was lucky enough to borrow one from the guys at NET to take a look.

The NET UX1000 is purpose built for the small to medium sized branch and smaller businesses. Like it’s bigger brother, it can be used for SIP trunks and ISDN PRI with an optional  SBA (core i3 server blade). It comes with all of the advanced features of its bigger brother as well – transcoding, firewall, AD Integration, call forking etc, and also brings the addition of BRI and Analog (FXS,FXO) interfaces. It will be modular, with up to 2 ISDN 30 ports and 6 additional module slots for the Analogue and BRI cards. Sold as preconfigured ‘typical use’ configurations, there is also the option of customisation (via authorised service partners) to specific needs. It will support up to 400 registered Lync users.

The UX1000 can have up to 2 ISDN PRI, which is nice as it means it can be sat ‘upstream’ in front of an old PBX allowing a gradual migration, routing calls based on querying Active Directory to see if they are a new Lync user or old PBX user (Of Couse, alternatively you can still use the 2 ISDN 30’s for regular ISDN trunks too). It also has Power-off Bypass on the ISDN and analogue ports, meaning if it is put upstream of a PBX and for whatever reason loses power, or needs to be quickly removed, once powered off, ISDN routes through 1 ISDN port to the other, straight to the old PBX. For the analogue ports, FXO are mapped directly to FXS, giving the ability to have ‘power fail’ analogue lines for a deployment.  It’s also fully compliant for media-bypass with TLS and SRTP.

It shares the same (very nice) Web interface with its bigger brother. Highlights include an A/B Software partition system to allow easy upgrade and rollback, call testing from the webUI and live (using Java) call monitoring system right in the webUI. It’s also got a VGA out header behind the front bezel which outputs the VGA feed from the server blade, which is pretty cool.

Overall it’s looking really good. Build quality even on the alpha was great (the standard I have come to expect from NET, who do a lot of Military and Government gateway work), the webUI is great for setup and on-going configuration for end users, and the 1U half depth form factor is ideal for the smaller deployment or branch. Modular form-factor is also a real plus.

The gateway is targeted to start at around £2,000 (approx. $3100) list price including SBA making it a nice affordable option for the Branch or small deployment. Final Units are due to ship before the end of this calendar year. If you’ve got any specific questions I’d love to hear them (no, the final units won’t come with the cool cutaway case

Below is a look at some of the webUI features and the unit (keep scrolling!).

A look at the Ports and ability to adjust the analog gain

Real time monitor, showing live calls, with details of the call status, e.g. ‘A’ for alerting.

There’s also a new neat feature for Lync calls to show when a call is in Media Bypass, with a ‘B’ displayed in the real-time view – no more wireshark to check if your media bypass setup is working…

Ability to adjust Ringing Cadence on Analog Ports

DSP Modules showing installed DSP’s and CPU load / channels in use for each DSP.

Licences (field upgradable with licence codes)