Over the next couple years, our company is looking at adding about 6 more branch offices, (we currently have only 2) - in doing this, the owner realizes he's going to have to make some pretty large changes in how the network is setup.
Right now, we have our main office on a commercial cable connection, and the 2 branch offices are on DSL. He wanted to order a seperate DSL connection for the main office so that if one connection went down, we could switch to the other. So what I guess I'm looking for are VPN routers that would know to switch over to another connection if the main one fails. We want to replaces the current ones (RoBox) anyway, since they don't make them anymore. Down the road a few months, we want to replace the cable connection with a T1 line, so then we'd have T1 with a secondary DSL connection, which I'm not sure would be necessary, but... there might be some reason to hang on to it. I haven't gotten to think that far in advance yet.
My other main question is whether we should setup the branch offices in a 'mesh' type configuration, so there were tunnels between all offices, or whether we should do more of a 'spoke' configuration, with the branches only tunneling to the main office. The plan would be for each office to have its own domain controller/file server, with the database and mail servers residing in the home office, as well as a 'master' (for lack of a better word) file server that all the branches dump to and handles backups. Some of the branches are going to be in remote parts of the country, and we would rather not have to rely on each branch office handling their own backups... plus, there aren't a lot of office-type documents created on a day-to-day basis, so it shouldn't take up a ton of nightly bandwidth to have the files dumped from the branches to home I wouldn't think.
We've consulted with a couple local firms about all this, and everyone seems to have their own opinion on how to best handle it - some say all this is excessive, others say its necessary. We'd rather be on the safe side, even if it is excessive. Cost is not the primary issue - uptime, redundancy, disaster recovery... those are the main concerns.
So, again, looking for recommended hardware (Cisco VPN routers?) that can do what I described, as well as opinions on how it should all be set up. Oh, and yeah, it's a Windows network (AD, exchange).
Oh, and one last thing - any recommendations on a spam filtering appliance? Quite frankly, I don't know if I want to risk manually setting up a spam assassin box - I haven't found a clear-cut howto on sending mail through a spam-assassin box and passing that off to an exchange server, and I won't have the time or resources to experiment with it for quite a while.
Thanks for any/all input.
Right now, we have our main office on a commercial cable connection, and the 2 branch offices are on DSL. He wanted to order a seperate DSL connection for the main office so that if one connection went down, we could switch to the other. So what I guess I'm looking for are VPN routers that would know to switch over to another connection if the main one fails. We want to replaces the current ones (RoBox) anyway, since they don't make them anymore. Down the road a few months, we want to replace the cable connection with a T1 line, so then we'd have T1 with a secondary DSL connection, which I'm not sure would be necessary, but... there might be some reason to hang on to it. I haven't gotten to think that far in advance yet.
My other main question is whether we should setup the branch offices in a 'mesh' type configuration, so there were tunnels between all offices, or whether we should do more of a 'spoke' configuration, with the branches only tunneling to the main office. The plan would be for each office to have its own domain controller/file server, with the database and mail servers residing in the home office, as well as a 'master' (for lack of a better word) file server that all the branches dump to and handles backups. Some of the branches are going to be in remote parts of the country, and we would rather not have to rely on each branch office handling their own backups... plus, there aren't a lot of office-type documents created on a day-to-day basis, so it shouldn't take up a ton of nightly bandwidth to have the files dumped from the branches to home I wouldn't think.
We've consulted with a couple local firms about all this, and everyone seems to have their own opinion on how to best handle it - some say all this is excessive, others say its necessary. We'd rather be on the safe side, even if it is excessive. Cost is not the primary issue - uptime, redundancy, disaster recovery... those are the main concerns.
So, again, looking for recommended hardware (Cisco VPN routers?) that can do what I described, as well as opinions on how it should all be set up. Oh, and yeah, it's a Windows network (AD, exchange).
Oh, and one last thing - any recommendations on a spam filtering appliance? Quite frankly, I don't know if I want to risk manually setting up a spam assassin box - I haven't found a clear-cut howto on sending mail through a spam-assassin box and passing that off to an exchange server, and I won't have the time or resources to experiment with it for quite a while.
Thanks for any/all input.
Facebook
Twitter