Our aging Watchguard died on us last week and it took 3 hours to get the backup up and running - it had sat in a cupboard for 4 years and the CMOS battery was flat, which stopped it booting...
I have just received a Cisco ASA5510, which should do a nice job, but trying to get straight answers about update costs and VPN licensing is like trying to get blood from a stone... We have about 20-30 tunnels to customers, which we activate as needed for support purposes, and we need some VPN access for our employees to access it on the road or from home.
Using IPSec, we shouldn't need any additional licences. I don't think we need much more. Is there any advantage to the licenced Cisco VPN solutions? The licensing costs can be horrific...
We also need some new switches, I'm looking at 4 HP 5150-25G EI switches (layer 3, 10Gbps interconnects). Has anybody any experience with these? Or can anyone recommend a decent server and infrastructure switch for a similar price? I was also looking at the Cisco Catalyst range, but they are about 30% more expensive, but don't seem to offer anything extra for the money.
We currently have a mix of D-Link Gbps and 3Com 100mbps switches, which cause all sorts of problems, with slow network connections and dropped connections. We've tested the cables and 99% of the sockets are working fine, those that didn't register a clean bill of health are either not used or used for telephone connections.
We have a small server farm (about half a dozen 19" rack mount servers) and around 40 employees. 3 switches in the server room, with local 10gbps interconnects and a 4th switch upstairs in the distribution cabinet is what I am planning.
