Router Recommendation

[ryan.bachman]

Hi all-

My two border routers are set to be returned off lease in a few months, and am just getting around to budgeting the new ones. I wanted to come here to get a general feeling of what I should replace my current equipment with.

Right now we have some outdated 7301s that we are using. They are strictly acting as routers, and terminating 3 VPN tunnels. There are no additional services that we are running on them, no QoS, no voice services; some security, but nothing too extensive. I don't see the need to go out and replace these with the high-end 7200s if the main requirement is that we have is enough Memory for full BGP routing tables.

One router is using a partial T3 connection, and the other one is on rate-limited ethernet. The tunnels are moving off, and we have other devices for our IPS and Security function. These are going on a 3 year lease, with not that much growth projected over that time-frame. We service close to 1000 persons internally, host several public websites, and of course demand 100% uptime and high reliability, but I think we can achieve that using a 3800 series rather than going with the 7200. It would be nice if I can free up some money to budget else where.

Thoughts?

Thanks.

[paolo bevilacqua]

I think you can do either with 38xx and the 7200. The high-performance of NPE-G1 are nice but it doesn't look you have so much traffic after all. I think it also a matter of design preferences as well.

For example someone likes to have one or two boxes doing everything, then the 65xx cold do everything in one box including powering your phones. On the other hand if you like separate function you can get specialized routers for BGP/WAN, others to terminate VPS, etc.

What I would get if you don't have it yet would be a L3 switch anyway, here the 38xx can be an advantage over the 7200 because the extended switch network module are like 3750's, full blown hardware l3 switches.

Hope this helps, please rate all useful posts!