Need help choosing router/vpn device for main/remote location

[hunter_alexander]

Greetings,

New here. Read quite a few articles on SNB. I am a network admin for a really small company. We are growing though, and are moving some users to a remote location. I have varying degrees of abilities.

I was looking at the Netgear 336G. I have read good and very bad about it.

My needs/haves/wants are as follows:

Needs: I need to connect our remote users (10-20 users) to the main location (35 users) for them to be able to access timesheets, excel docs etc. They also need to connect to the internet through the remote locations T1 and Cable (dual wans for redundancy).

Haves: Both locations have dual wans (T1 and cable). Both the remote location and the main office have routers on the T1 (static IP) supplied by the ISP's. Both locations cable modems are non static IP's.

Wants: Looking for a good firewall device for the main location to replace the Netgear 114F on the cable modem and to provide better load balancing\failover capabilities. Would like it to be able to handle growth, as the remote location is only temporary until the buildout at the main location is completed. The remote users will then move back to the main office.

Price is important. Functionality is important. Reliability is important.

I am not well versed on some of this, but I learn quickly. Im not sure how the remote location users will authenticate to the servers at the main location (or even if they need to for that matter). The remote location will not have a server. All users are Windows7 Ent 32bit or Vista Ent 32bit systems (with maybe 1 xp business thrown in).

Can someone give me some recommendations? Is the 336G going to be good enough for what I need it to do? What about sonicwall?

Any help or insight greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[argint]

You could get pfsense for free, very stable, many features, and just buy two embedded controllers. Site to site vpn, no probs, along with a host of other features.....we run it on a soekris board. It is rock solid.


http://www.pfsense.com/

controller

http://www.soekris.com/net5501.htm

 

[hunter_alexander]

Not something I am looking at using at the present. Thanks though.

I was looking at the Sonicwall TZ210 for the main office and the TZ200 for the remote office.

Anyone have any opinions?

 

[claykin]

Look @ the Zyxel USG100 or 200. Big difference is USG 200 has faster CPU and capability for triple WAN. I use the USG200 in 3 x WAN config with failover and load balance and it works great.

Zyxel gives free firmware upgrades for life. Sonicwall......holds you hostage to support agreements.

 

[hunter_alexander]

Thanks. Just did some reading on them and yes while the firmware might be free (antivirus as well), all the other intrusion protection items are subscription based just like all the other vendors.

Dont need the triple wan (cool though). I will keep this one in mind, thanks.

 

[claykin]

Thanks. Just did some reading on them and yes while the firmware might be free (antivirus as well), all the other intrusion protection items are subscription based just like all the other vendors.

Dont need the triple wan (cool though). I will keep this one in mind, thanks.

UTM is not free on the Zyxel. They give the first 30 days as a trial, after you pay just like Sonicwall and everyone else. You have to ask yourself if you really need the UTM addons. These UTM AV, antispam, blah blah tools are OK, but have serious limitations. They aren't able to detect viruses in all file types, cannot scan secure connections, etc.... Plus they burden the router CPU and can slowdown throughput if you have a lot of users.

Consider using OPENDNS for content filtering and very basic protection and deploy client/server based AV, etc.