network desgin...suggestions welcome!

[dogsbod]

If one had to design a network for:

70 users at the main office
2 remote offices with 5-10 users each connected to main office via vpn.
7 servers.
And access from home for 5 people to main office

what infrastructure hardware would one use. Redundancy being critical. thanks in advanced

 

[jpm121]

Hehe... your definition of critical has to have some sort of budget figure associated with it. Otherwise I'd spec dedicated fiber runs with backup T1s, hot spares of everything, and an offsite data replication for disaster recovery. If you write me a check for $3,000,000 I'll even supply the hardware and services to make it happen!

Also, what sort of apps are on the servers? What kind of internet at the remote sites, and at the main office? Are you hosting websites or just app/file/domain controller/e-mail type servers?

FWIW, one of my clients has 50 users at the main office and 40 or so at 4 remote locations around town. We have 4 point to point T1s coming into a 2691 Cisco with data and voice, a 2621XM with a PRI for voice, and a PIX 506 hooked to an internet feed. Main office has 3 stacked 3550 POE switches handling voice and data, with a gigabit uplink to a 12-port gigabit switch that has all the servers on it. Each remote office has a 2950 switch and a 1721 router with a T1 card.

Give some more details about what you're looking for and we can help.

 

[hunterdw]

Dogsbod,

I have similar network thoughts... larger scale, but same idea.

At my main office, I have several 3550 POE switches stacked together and uplinked into a gigabit switch for my server farm and fibre farm.

i have another campus connected to this via a 100meg Point to point fibre link (i use that for disaster recovery).

My "core" VPN router is a 1710

My remote sites have a 1760V with Wic0 being a 10BT ethernet wic, VIC 0 and VIC 1 are 2FXO for my call manager implementation. I also have the 3DES VPN Module on the 1760V and have tunnels built between my 1760V (remote) adn 1710 "central"

For backup, I have a business DSL connection. I route all my internet traffic out of IPCop (

http://www.ipcop.org)

which has a nifty open source VPN connection that I use to build a redundant tunnel to another 1710 at central.

I don't have "automated" failover. I have to manually switch the routes both at central and remotely. The good part is, IPCop does port fowarding too, so if primary link fails, I can still "backdoor" into my remote router to change routes using IPCop/VPN

7 remote sites, 30 servers, 500 workstations, 150 phones, Call Manager, Unity, 10TB of active data and 99.94% uptime the last 18 months since I started.

That's "cheap" redundancy...

--DW