peplink, zyxel or something else?

[Michael Park]

Hi

I am trying to solve WAN and LAN problems in my company. We have around 30 computers and 20 printers.

Right now, 2 internet connections(ADSL and cable), CISCO ASA 5505, TP-LINK load balancer EP-5120 and bunch of 24 ports switches.

2 internet connections
ADSL :10 up and 1 down for backup
CABLE : 200 down and 15 up - main

Problems we having are
1. CISCO ASA 5505 only has 100mbit port, not gigabyte. Can't utilize full speed of main line.
2. TP-LINK load balancer doesn't work as load balancer just fail over.
3. We are forced to use CISCO due to VPN

I was considering Peplink balance ONE and Zyxel products. I would like to keep it simple. One device does it all. VPN, Load balancer, firewall and DHCP server.

which will be my best option?

thank you in advance.

 

[coxhaus]

Probably hard to load balance with your ADSL speed.
You might want to consider DHCP from a server so while you are working on the router all the machines still run fine locally. I assume you have a server you can load DHCP server on.

 

[Michael Park]

Probably hard to load balance with your ADSL speed.
You might want to consider DHCP from a server so while you are working on the router all the machines still run fine locally. I assume you have a server you can load DHCP server.

I actually forgot to mention that our company is heading to cloud base. So no more server client. All I need is no down time on internet connection, firewall and VPN for old server access

 

[System Error Message]

Mikrotik routerboards are much cheaper than peplinks for the performance and functionality. While it cannot bond VPN links you can however configure it to load balance instead of failover. It does however require a lot of skill to setup compared to peplinks. A routerboard is very flexible in how you can configure it. One thing you can do with mikrotik is have the firewall/routing to be biased in load balancing between multiple links. The only thing it lacks is the DHCP features you get on pfsense. DHCP for it can be configured for multiple networks and users but it lacks the depth and control the DHCP server in pfsense has. If your company has the skill for configuration and you want propriatery hardware than i would suggest a mikrotik CCR. If choosing between peplink or zylink than peplink will win if you dont have the skill needed to set things up manually. The only thing i have against peplink is their very high costs.

The way peplink VPN works is that it creates a layer 4 VPN tunnel between one device and another and uses load balancing algorithms to send packets using available links. It can be done on mikrotik routerOS in multiple ways it just needs to be set up to do it (the algorithm has to be made using rules/features/routes that are available). Each cpu core of the mikrotik CCR does 300Mb/s of PPTP VPN or 2Gb/s of NAT. Take a look at demo.mt.lv for a view of features that mikrotik routerOS has. They have the same features for all their routers and x86 except for metarouter (virtual router) and switch functionalities. Their licenses are less restrictive than peplink especially if you plan to have a large number of network devices.

None of these devices will work well in a cloud environment if you are expecting them to do cloud based DHCP so consider a full server OS for that.