Business Router

arty

arty

arty

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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Location
Stamford
Hi guys,

I work at a small software development company which is about to move into new premises due to expansion. Currently we have around 15 regular employees and quite a few racks, servers etc., but we are expecting to be at 25-30 by summer next year with a bit more infrastructure to support them.

We currently have a Draytek 2820 which I set up and maintain, and this week it has started to flake out, randomly reboot, give weird errors and other such things after giving a flawless service for a few years! Given that it's a few years old now my boss (MD) has asked me to look into replacing it with something new when we move office in the next week or two. I am not a network engineer but I have a technical background, and I am looking for any suggestions or recommendations as this is outside my experience! :)

We need the following features:

1. Wireless-N (which could be provided by an AP) - a guest network with client isolation and as a separate VLAN plus a private MAC-address whitelisted network
2. Decent VPN support - the Draytek is okay but I wouldn't mind more DNS-related features (e.g. splitting); not against these being provided by a separate appliance
3. DHCP and MAC-IP binding
4. Port forwarding
5. Decent firewall (again, could be provided by a separate appliance)
6. Basic bandwidth / QoS management features, though we're not making extensive use of these currently there is an interest in doing so in future
7. Remote management features, e.g. over the internet
8. Various monitoring / diagnostic tools, a la usage graphs etc. as in the Draytek as we find these quite helpful for diagnosing issues

We will be using FTTC in our new premises which will be available in the next week or two. I don't believe we'll need ADSL / 3G / modem failover but it might be a 'nice to have'.

I believe a budget of £500-1000 is realistic, and as I said I'd really welcome any suggestions. Thanks a lot for reading! :)
 
What sort of skill set do you have? I'd be looking at something along the line of an 887v with an ASA 5505 for that size. WIFI would obviously be separate.

Are you comfortable with this sort of thing or were you preferring an integrated unit or something with a GUI?

- GP
 
GhostlyPea said:
What sort of skill set do you have? I'd be looking at something along the line of an 887v with an ASA 5505 for that size. WIFI would obviously be separate.

Are you comfortable with this sort of thing or were you preferring an integrated unit or something with a GUI?

- GP
Click to expand...

I am fairly comfortable with a CLI - we do a lot of work with Linux servers, for instance - but bear in mind that I lack experience so would probably need more time to get up to speed if there is no GUI. I'm not sure how much time would be available to me for this - maybe 2-3 days at most?
 
Well if you're happy to give it a bash then it isn't that hard. There is a GUI for each device although I don't like it and try and avoid it, but it is there (It also provides some graphs and monitoring etc.). I don't think its hard to set these devices up, but then its my day job so I'm biased :P

There's plenty of documentation around for configuration of each and some basic guides will get you started (bare in mne you'll need an allocated block of IPs to sit between the ASA and router, not just the vDSL interface on the router). Being business grade kit they are incredibly feature rich and compliant with other external apps etc. just bare in mind that you'll want proper support on these devices in case something goes wrong - that probably wont be too cheap unless your happy to run that risk (SmartNet ideally).

There are other options - maybe a small Netscreen or Checkpoint Safe at Office to sit behind or go for some sort of Billion etc. etc. as they aren't too bad for the price but I don't count them as business grade.

- GP
 
Thanks for the thoughts, I'm going to do a bit of research. As always with small companies it's a balance between 'enterprise' and DIY!
 
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