Hello Everyone,
We are in the market for a used integrated service router and switch to manage
our network. A 24 port gigabit switch should suffice accompanied with
an industry
grade router. We like buying used (still under warranty) equipment as
long as there
is good feedback. Which make and models are you gents and ladies liking these
days?
Some Requirements for the router:
IPSEC and VPN Enabled
Transcoding capabilities using PVDM2 and NM-HDV2
We were considering:
Cisco 3845
Cisco WS-C2960G-24TC-L
But I thought I would get some insight on value, pricing, and
scalability before making
a recommendation.
Kind Regards,
Nick.
Hello Eric,
Thank you so much for your response. The 6500 is what I was trained on
however, for this case we cannot afford the rackspace. We're building
highly efficient networks using mainly virtual machines and
fiberchannel backbone. I did however overlook the 1Gig limit of the
38/3900s....
So basically build our own linux router using a stripped down version of gentoo?
N.
For that sort of use case one of the new SDN offerings might work for you?
If not, mikrotik has any roll your own based on gentoo router beat
--srs
Not sure what your budge is but you might consider the ASR1k. Or the Juniper MX104.
Mike
Mx80 Might work if you are looking at Expansion options for future it comes
with Modular Cards or Tested Cisco 760x series might suffice as well. Other
Options like Mikrotik as above stated might work but i myself never tested
that brand though
Rakesh
If you're going to consider Mikrotik, I'd also highly recommend that you
look into Vyatta (www.vyatta.com). They offer (well, or did last time I
looked, they seem to be increasingly commercial every time I visit their
site) fully supported software as well as software-on-vendor-hardware
solutions, plus an open source "core" offering. I've never done BGP on
them, but I've used them as edge routers/firewalls for smallish internal
networks as well as IPSEC endpoints, and their performance on modern
server-grade hardware (i.e. the type of stuff lying around in many
shops) is mind-boggling.
Post Script: I just went to vyatta.com, and apparently they've been
acquired by Brocade. The former content of their web site is gone, and
as far as I can tell from the Brocade site
(http://www.brocade.com/products/all/network-functions-virtualization/index.page)
they *seem* to be calling the software solution the "Brocade Vyatta 5400
vRouter". I assume this means their range of supported hardware devices
may be done for. Luckily I kept an archive of all of their wonderful
anti-cisco ads...
-Jason
vyatta.org is still around.
~Seth
Post Script: I just went to vyatta.com, and apparently they've been
acquired by Brocade. The former content of their web site is gone, and
as far as I can tell from the Brocade site
(Broadcom Inc. | Connecting Everything)
they *seem* to be calling the software solution the "Brocade Vyatta 5400
vRouter". I assume this means their range of supported hardware devices
may be done for. Luckily I kept an archive of all of their wonderful
anti-cisco ads...
Too funny. This reminds me of an old experience I had when companies
where acquired and we were left out in the cold..... I think on
Monday, I will make the recommendation to purchase an IBM xServer 3250
M5 (comes 1 PCIe V3 x4 and x8), throw Quagga on there and call it a
day. It will have everything we need except for transcoding? Oh wait!
We can buy hardware transcoder line cards as well. The problem is
there are only two slots, and one I bet is reserved for some raid
controller or something like that...
As for the switch, is the 2960G have a proven track record?
Thanks for everyone's help 
Nick from Toronto.
Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
N.
"As for the switch, is the 2960G have a proven track record?"
We've deployed a lot of these in normal access-switch roles and
they've worked flawlessly. You should be able to pick some up for
relatively cheap from resellers. They'd be even cheaper if you get
them from ebay.
If anyone has one for sale that has not had it's ports beat to hell
please let us know.
We would be interested.
We get ours from Network Hardware Resellers. It's
Smartnet-contractable, which is important for us, and was pretty
cheap.
Shoot me a message offlist if you want our sales rep's info. He might
be able to help you out.
What about a Cisco cloud services router? These devices scale quite nicely.
You can even use them for 60 days on a trial license.