Point to Point or VPN

[lashboy]

Hey Guys,

I just joined this company as junior engineer and the new member of team and we are IT solution provider! i have been assigned projects and I think this group is great Help! to complete these projects!


I have to install network for one of our new clients next month. this client has 5 location in town so I am wondering should I go ahead and purchase point to point circuits from telco provider and install cisco router on each location ( if we go with Point to point we have to to provide Internet access with DSL or some thing )

or I should get seperate T1 line on each location and install router and pix and bringup tunnels between locations??

its small business office with 40 to 50 users each location..

can we discuss which one is better??

 

[JOAMON]

Two cents...

I would consider going full or frac T1 point to point from 4 remote offices to a central location. Central location would have 2 dedicated T1 internet connections bonded together in a multilink configuration for a 3 meg connection to the internet. You could keep costs down with this setup as you would not need expensive routers to terminate the T1 lines. You could do it with a 1721 w/wic-1dsu-t1 at remote sites, 1721 w/ 2 wic-1dsu-T1 at corporate for the internet border router connecting to say a 2811 w/advanced security feature set and T1 cards to connect the remote sites to the router. The 2811 would do all routing, nat, firewalling, IPS, VPN, etc., etc. I have almost this exact setup in service right now only am using 2611 instead of 1721 for remote routers and the 2811 as central router.

 

[CorruptedLogic]

I've done something very similar to that in the past Joamon, except I bundled 3 full T1's together. Worked like a champ til one of the T1's started flapping!!

Lashboy, you could do far worse than giving Joamon's suggestion some thought. Building PVC's between sites over the T1's will give you nice reliability and ease of configuration. Not mention that you can easily throttle the bandwidth for each PVC, so if you have one big office and one small office, you can divide up the 3 megs accordingly.

CCNA, CCDP, Net+, A+
Work Smarter, Not Harder....

 

[lashboy]

Joaman, we have similar network installed at one of our clients but with three locations. in past 2 months main location went down for couple of times and other 2 offices had to suffer also. they were not even able to use internet so recently I installed DSL at every location for internet so that they can atleast use internet when main location is down..

builing PVC on T1 is looks like trouble free setup as we have tons of network installed at our clients and working fine..

Thanks guys! I just wanted get opinion from you expert guys and I think it should be enough to make my decision.

 

[plshlpme]

when building a hub/spoke network your always going to need to keep in mind that if you lose the hub.. you need a backup at that point. ie dsl..

i think the hub is the better setup for a company though for control and policies.

 

[lgarner]

Primary rule: If you lose the local connection, you lose connectivity.

Depending on distance and cost, as well as how reliable the network must be, I'd look into Frame or MPLS for the primary network and a VPN as backup. Then you can mesh the network as much as you like to remove one of the single points of failure.

 

[JOAMON]

Keep in mind that when attempting to setup backup for say a T1 at the hub say with a DSL circuit that the copper for both of hose will come into the bldg in the same bundle. Also that copper for both probably terminates at the same CO. The only way a redundent circuit will be redundent is if they are in seperate bundles of copper from two different suppliers terminating at different co facitities. WE have not had a complete downtime of our internet in over a year. We have lost one of the two
T1 lines in our multilink internet connection and the only result was reduced bandwidth. I asked our provider to make sure that even though both T1 lines go to the same CO that at least they are placed on seperate equipment racks from each other. DSL would be a good backup for the spokes but keep in mind that for every connection you have that many more access points of possible hacks and attacks. I prefer the central hub approach as I only need to configure security and monitor at one point.

 

[plshlpme]

if the hub is mission critical... you can request all kinds of diversity.. just depends on what its worth to you.

the more diverse the more $$$

co diversity, manhole diversity, PE diversity etc...