Good Day All,
We are getting a new internet connection for our schools campus of 500Mbit (Both up and down so total of 1GBps). We presently use a Juniper Firewall Appliance capable of 200Mbit. Needless to say these firewalls are thousands and thousands of dollars, and I am wondering if a Mikrotik powered device could serve as a great cheap alternative to serve as our school's firewall?
Does anybody have any thoughts on this?
I also asked previously on this forum about replacing our packet shaper also with a Mikrotik based solution. We currently have a Blue Coat Appliance taking care of our "Shaping". It presently limits every IP address to 'X' MBit. We are presently not prioritizing much traffic at all which I believe we should be. People for example who have XBoxes and are trying to play XBox live tend to have poor performance although it doesn't take much traffic. I would like to work on our connection's 'shaping' to be able to provide the best connection possible to everybody. We are taking a huge step by upping our bandwidth which has been the biggest problem to begin with.
We have on campus housing and have at least 1100 students, most of which stay on campus and use the same internet connection. This is not even including our staff of about 300, and even our on campus alumni also using the same connection. So there is a lot of activity on a continuous basis.
I would love to use a Mikrotik based solution to also be able to pull up live graphs of our current internet usage etc.
If anybody has any ideas I would be open to discussion. We will be implementing this new connection in the next couple of months so time is of the essence.
Thank you!