I am trying to determine which routers to purchase for a small branch office deployment. Any suggestions very welcome.
Basically, we have a central office with no more than 50 employees. We then will have four branch offices with no more than 20 employees each. We want to connect evertying over a VPN. The connections to the Internet would vary (DSL, ISDN, and T1) but would terminate on separate devices so that the Cisco router would only need Ethernet interfaces.
Will 831s work for this? Does a 1721 add anything to the mix?
Does anything change if the number of employees bumps up to 100 at central and the number of sites goes to 10?
Finally, what if we also want to terminate roaming laptop client VPN connections as well?
it isnt so much the employee numbers as the WAN link speeds, traffic levels and the number of connections to other sites that dictate the router.
The connections to the Internet would vary
i prefer to have an interface in the router - esp. with interfaces that the router may need to control like ISDN (where a mistake can generate lots of calls and call charges).
generally, the routers you suggest are still available, but are old models and likely to get phased out soon. use the newer ISR range - they have built in encryption hardware.
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87x are the small ones (equiv to the 831, but faster).
if you want higher throughput then the 1801 has ADSL and 2 ethernets, but there are others in the 180x range that may be better - note that you get extra interfaces such as ADSL, but the box is cheaper than a more flexible unit with only ethernet ports
assuming that the traffic pattern is star based, (unless you are planning to use IP telephony between branches) then you need a bigger box at the central site.
you need to pick the software options that give you support for the encryption, firewalling etc you need - and since this can be 30% or more of the cost you need to get it right.
831s may be enough for the small sites, but i would use 871.
1811 or 1812 or something bigger will be needed for the central site. the box depends on the bandwidth
you can do this on a router, but i prefer the VPN servers, since they are easier to use with VPN clients, and minimising the client issues is what makes a VPN less difficult.
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