Which Router for small business

jamoor · 26 Jan 2018 at 20:00

We have 10 clients hooked up to a 30mb leased line doing usual office tasks, nothing special.

We also have an adsl failover.

Can anyone recommend a decent business class router with Dual WAN for load balancing/failover? I don't need wireless and the like.

I've looked at the Draytek range, e.g vigor 2926. Anyone have any experience? Thanks.

jamoor · 26 Jan 2018 at 20:35

Any reason for not recommending it?

Which mikrotik?

I have had a look at the cisco and juniper ones, I am not sure if I need all the threat management features, seems a bit overkill that's all.

£400 odd is a bit beyond our budget too :/

jamoor · 27 Jan 2018 at 10:43

crinkleshoes said:
£400 investment into the core infrastructure of a business is chump change... tell the managers they need to realise the importance... how much money would they lose if they lost the internet access for 1 day? or 2-3 weeks, as is the turnaround time for a Draytek RTB warranty?

Threat management is becoming ever more important... but those features are optional, per an extra charge... not included in the base price... although with Juniper... they're not very expensive... Meraki and Cisco have a large markup on the service.

I still have the old sonicwall as a backup so that's not too much of a concern.

Mikrotik seem good value, are they any good?

jamoor · 27 Jan 2018 at 14:35

crinkleshoes said:
Yeah, they’re pretty good, especially for the price.

Draytek are ok too... we have 100s of them deployed and minimal issues.

Have you ever had any problems with them crashing or anything like that?

jamoor · 27 Jan 2018 at 14:36

crinkleshoes said:
Preferably yes, but given their tight budget - I would rather 1 good router over 2 crummy ones.

To be fair I have my old router as a backup, for 10 users even a consumer router will do until a replacement is sourced. I think some people lose sight of the fact that not every business is a 200 user multi site business that require time critical infrastructure.

jamoor · 27 Jan 2018 at 21:26

crinkleshoes said:
Yes... under a few scenarios.

1. When auto-reboot is enabled... sometimes they simply will not come back and have to be returned to base to fix (or have an engineer onsite)... a simple power cycle won't do. The fix is to update the firmware (even if it's to the same version) and it brings them back online.
2. HA likes to throw a hissy fit for no apparent reason and will just start switching between the primary and secondary routers in a loop causing severe network disruption and only resolved by powering them off and back on again.
3. On the slightly older firmware versions, we would randomly see the CPU usage spike to 80-100% and stay there... it would just happen with no apparent reason. It would cause massive pings continuously & dropped packets. The latest firmware version appears to have resolved this.

I don't like Drayteks very much... I'm pushing my company towards SonicWall, Juniper and Meraki.

That said, for the price point, the Drayteks generally do a good job.

Yeah... with tight budget limitations - I'd also do that... spend the money on a really good primary but keep something that'll hopefully cover the basics if the primary fails.

The ideal is of course to have 2 good ones... but I'd rather go that route with 1 good one and 1 consumer, rather than 2 cheapy business level things.

I've heard good things about the Fortigates... haven't had a chance to try them myself yet.

We have a customer who are looking to install a 10gig fibre line shortly & I'm looking to try a Fortigate for that as their price/performance on 10 gig WAN is much better than the competition.

This doesn't sound great. I have a TZ205 at the moment and I haven't ever touched it and am looking for a similar experience.