Equipment decisions
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It's high time to move up in the world. With my 100Mbps circuit from TWC and AT&T's 25Mbps circuit which should be bumping up to 1Gbps, if my contacts at the Death Star are to believed, my equipment has reached it's limit.
I had this happen a few years ago with my old Peplink. I bonded two 3Mbps DSL pipes and a single 10Mbps TWC pipe, found out the hard way that Peplink has a 15Mbps speed limit. My RV042 is better, but still not close to handling all I got now. With the old 50Mbps TWC pipe it worked just fine.
So decision time, and where to buy. Anyone know some equipment that will support over 2Gbps over ethernet, has good load balancing protocols, and won't cost me my left nut? I'm thinking Cisco's 1800/1900 with an ASA, but that's gonna cost me big. The Junipers at that level ain't cheap. Fortigate's have less than stellar load balancing. To get performance out of Vyatta I would have to go community, and a dual ethernet card aint cheap at $400 or so plus finding a chassis I can get all the equipment into. pfSense would do it, but again, same issue as Vyatta, equipment is hard to source and not cheap for what I need. And if I wanted to go back to Peplink, it would cost me $4K.
I'm almost tempted to just go big and buy a Cisco UCS with all the modules I will ever need. Who else would have one of those in their home?
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Check out Ubiquiti, it can push some serious throughput.
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Cisco is slow in comparison to Ubiquiti. That's why UBNT always compare against because they are so much faster.
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For the cost I would try the Ubiquiti EdgeMax Pro router.
I have never used their load balancing settings, but the throughput should not be an issue with it.
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@PSX_Defector said:
...I'm almost tempted to just go big and buy a Cisco UCS with all the modules I will ever need. Who else would have one of those in their home?
Can't say I would be interested in have Cisco at home with the yearly subscription rates... IIRC, @scottalanmiller posted a hardware comparison of Cisco and UBNT recently... HUGE cost differences.
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@g.jacobse said:
Can't say I would be interested in have Cisco at home with the yearly subscription rates... IIRC, @scottalanmiller posted a hardware comparison of Cisco and UBNT recently... HUGE cost differences.
That's Meraki. Meraki is a product of Cisco, Cisco is another product of Cisco. They aren't related other than the same parent company owns them both.
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Thank you for the correctly / clarification Scott
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Cisco gear proper is really expensive too, but a completely different pricing model. And they make massively higher end gear. Cisco makes enterprise gear. Meraki makes SMB gear. Cisco Linksys (now Belkin) makes high end consumer gear. Hard to tell when it is Linksys as Cisco slaps their name on anything so you can't tell if you are getting enterprise equipment or consumer sometimes. It's why lots of people in the SMB don't realize that they make serious stuff anymore. It's like how the average consumer thinks of GE as a maker of microwaves, bad televisions and lightbulbs. But they make things like nuclear reactors too.
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I actually totally forgot about a product I've used in my past, which will easily handle that amount of bandwidth, has a great firewall, can handle multiple pipes like a champ and is cheap to boot!
Used to use this equipment back in the old days when a Cisco router would cost you both your left nut and your first born. We used to use them for various ISP functions, mostly as core routers or ATM concentrators. People use it now for it's wireless management, lots of WISPs are on the gear.
Not as sexy and cool as Cisco UCSes sitting in my closet, but certainly wouldn't cost me as much as my truck.
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Microtik is supposed to be awesome. I've heard nothing but rave reviews about them.
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One of the main reasons I was thinking Cisco was due to the ability to get in SFPs to hook into anything I needed. Core switches, straight fiber into my servers, who knows what I could do.
The Mikrotik gear has multiple SFPs plus switching gear to handle anything. So jacking into my Cisco gear over fiber is a snap, or I can go up to 10G and get real hard core.
One of these:
http://routerboard.com/CCR1009-8G-1S
And one of these:
http://routerboard.com/CRS125-24G-1S-2HnD-IN
I can run anything at that setup, it will never choke on bandwidth. Time to whip out the AMEX, I've got a purchase to make.
