A coworker and I are trying to settle a debate and, unfortunately, I don't have enough experience or training (or knowledge) to properly defend my stance-- or maybe I'm just wrong-- so I'm bringing it here to ask the experts:
We have a client who has roughly 130 employees, and for whatever reason they own a Dell SonicWall SSL-VPN 2000 for their remote staff, which is running firmware 4.0.0.13 I believe. The office has a 20M fiber line that runs like a champ. The equipment on site is all gigabit, including their firewall, but the SonicWall of course has 100Mb ports. At any given time there are 2-4 users connected remotely, but there are times that as many as 12 are connected at once. Worth mentioning is that during business hours there is a lot of traffic going through the firewall to a web application the internal employees use.
The question is about speed and throughput, and ultimately whether or not the 100Mb ports on the VPN hardware is a limiting factor in overall performance (vs a gigabit VPN). My argument has always been that the biggest and perhaps only limitation is the remote users' ISP / bandwidth, and that the client's configuration should be able to easily accommodate the amount of people connecting without a problem.
Ultimately the client is complaining that their users have slow connections and is convinced a new VPN solution is needed.