I had a SonicWall NSA240 in my home for my Home Office and a SonicWall Pro2040 for my Home use which worked well for my needs. I had both routers connected to my Comcast Business Class 50 Mbps/10 Mbps with 1 static IP. The NSA240 had the static while the Pro2040 was just connected getting an IP address from the Comcast Gateway on DMZ. That was, until I had a little incident when my basement flooded when my sump pump failed and the rack my equipment was on fell over. Needless to say, my stuff is trashed.
Now while I'm waiting for insurance to pay-up I need to look into a new setup. I know Sonicwall very well and I've used them for a very long time. I also have used Barracuda and Cisco and I have good/bad/indifferent to say about all three. SonicWall after the Dell buyout has suffered a bit. The same with the Cisco, reliability has gone way down and license costs and nickle and diming have gone way up.
My requirements are:
Next-Gen IPS & DPI firewall
At least 100 Mbps throughput on all fronts
Full routing, DHCP and NAT
Vlans
Now here is my conundrum, the New E-Class NSA's tout this "Full-DPI" where the regular NSA just touts DPI. I've been in this game for a while, and I have yet to have heard of Full-DPI before. I'm a security junkie and want my fix but for nearly $20k entrance fee, I'm not that addicted.
I'm planning on ditching dual routers for a single unit, with a single Internet pipe (I live in the sticks, not many options) and a single cat6 to a GbE Smart switch and allow the vlans to do the rest.
For work, I have a Desktop and a Polycom IP-550 SIP phone which connects to a Digium Switchvox hosted at a Datacenter my Employer uses plus a dual-band N-wifi Laptop. For my home stuff, I have smart TV's, Tivo's, etc...
For VPN, I usually just use my desktop to VPN to the cloud and work on my datacenter from there although I also have Kaseya to manage and access my stuff. However 99% of my work is remote desktop, XenCenter and I could be on 5 different RDP's or VNC's at a time. Plus I have my own Terminal server where I have my outlook and office apps. That eats up a lot of bandwidth and latency is the killer.
For Home, Netflix, Pandora, Hulu, HBOGo plus Firefox with at least 10 tabs open - not to mention iPads, iPhones, etc...
For the wireless, I had a single Linksys EA4500 which worked well when I lived in a 1200 sq ft townhouse. But in God's Country - space is cheap. It doesn't go nearly as well in 3000 sq ft. I had my eye on Ubiquiti, especially the AC capable AP's but they have yet to get the roaming hand-off working right. I just deployed a nice Netgear managed wifi solution with WNDAP350's and a Controller - but that might be a little much. I could go with SonicPoints, but even with my massive discounts - even they get a little pricey.
That and SonicWall's support has gone from bad to worse to downright poop. I think the only reason I'm inkling towards Barracuda is because their support is that much better. Cisco's support is equally as bad as SonicWalls.
Any Ideas?
Cheers,
Mike