Gallagher’s SMB; complete in an SMB Base Kit incorporating Controller 6000, power supply, controller, fire drop and I/O boards wrapped up in a weather-sealed metal housing; has arrived at SEN for review.
SMB Controller 6000 sits between the system’s device boards in the local housing and cloud servers, allowing users to manage alarms, access control, and site management tasks from a mobile device. SMB also offers small businesses self-monitoring capabilities, allowing them to receive alarm notifications and respond, with actions logged in the event history.
After a quick run-through of SMB’s app and browser interface from Gallagher’s Sabrish Venugopal and Sam Afzali, I get to keep the Base Kit at the office. Once the boys are gone, I do a bit of gawping and quickly conclude this is a lovely set up. The system arrives complete in a housing that’s robust, purpose-built and has plenty of hand space for working installers. Everything you need is already in the housing – it’s about bringing in local devices and commissioning locally or remotely using laptop, tablet or phone.
As appealing as it is to focus on the lovely hardware, from an operational perspective Gallagher SMB revolves around that mobile interface supported by local AWS cloud and a subscription model which is surprisingly affordable. Needless to say, I find the SMB app easy to navigate, as well as being informative.
This solution’s specific alarm/access focus makes negotiating SMB easy – alarm event notifications and management and reporting of responses is a snap. Other key bits of functionality – system status, arming and disarming, managing responses to alarm events, badging tags via mobile phone – are simple and very fast. Being able to set the system up for disarming/unlock when a user’s phone comes within a set range is very appealing, too.
My first impressions of Gallagher SMB were that it offered Gallagher’s robust hardware quality supported by an extremely simple cloud-based interface that feels highly evolved, even though the system only landed in Australia 4 months ago. Stand by for the full review in the November issue of SEN!
Features of Gallagher SMB include:
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) with a connection encrypted by Transport Layer Security (TLS) is used for secure network updates using cloud servers
Controller data is safely stored and backed up in the cloud
Controller is supported with a 4G cellular router, which connects to a private Vodafone network if the sites local TCP/IP network connection is lost
High speed RS-485 connectivity and software updates to field devices
Strong authentication and encryption between the controller and AWS cloud servers
Remote configuration support through the Installer Config application
Support for multiple wiring topologies, allowing easy connectivity of existing field devices without re-wiring
Access control support for up to 10 doors, with multiple readers configurable per door
An unlimited number of alarm Areas and Area Groups
An unlimited number of users
80,000 system events.
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