I have RB951Ui-2HnD at home, and i’m planning to use the very same model at work, just wondering if it will be sufficient for small office with about 60 employee (each one of them have laptop and smart phone), i have a file server which i need to give fifteen of the employees the ability to access it using VPN when they’r out of the office.
I have only 24 Mbps ADSL internet connection.
please note that i will disable the wireless in the routerboard (i have four access points).
Could somebody please tell me if tat model will be sufficient for the job or i will need a stronger model?
If your fileserver has a gigabit interface, I wouldn’t be using RB951Ui-2HnD but RB951G-2HnD that has gigabit interfaces so that doesn’t become a bottleneck.
As far as internet routing duties, an RB951 will be enough for a 24Mbps ADSL line and 60 computers.
However if you don’t plan to use its wireless (which BTW, is top-notch, the reference on non AC soho RBs) a better fit for your application maybe be a RB450G.
It doesn’t have wireless, has similarly powered CPU but has double the RAM; in your scenario while bandwidth isn’t going to be the bottleneck, having memory to spare is going to be an advantage to keep those 60 PCs in the firewall connection table; also QoS (Queue tree) which I’d say is mandatory in your situation, will benefit from that extra memory.
If you intend to use IPSec based VPNs, and you expect those mobile workers to increase, I would consider an RB850Gx2, 2nd revision, which has hardware acceleration for IPSec AES.
This is a completely different beast, with 512Mb RAM and dual core powerpc architecture which will be more than enough, but would be a wise investment if planning for the future or in the event of FTTH reaching you.
It costs almost twice as much, and the amount of RAM is an overkill for 60 workstations even on RB951 if used without wireless.
If wireless is not required, I’d go for hEX (RB750Gr2). For the same price as RB951Ui-2HnD it has better CPU and 1G ports. The amount of RAM is twice as low (64MB), but that’s more then enough. I have an experience using an old RB750GL in a network of about 80 workstations, and the amount of RAM has never been a problem.
Thanks a lot, but i have a question about the routerboards that you mentioned, some of them doesn’t have a case, how can i use them in the office?
Thanks.
Most probably the shop selling them will also have the proper case, that fits both: http://routerboard.com/CA150
Thank you.