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The Best VPN solutions?

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by buschman_007 2 views

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I am the sole IT manager for my company. We have three locations and use VPN heavily. Some of my problems are inherited from the previous IT guy and the lack of spending that was going on in his day.

Currently the company has two VPN solutions, none of which is working 100%.

The Nortel Contivity 1500 was the old solution. The upside is that it is only solution that even remotely works with satellite employees(I'll explain more later). The downside is that it randomly drops people with no apparent reason. I also have no support contract remaining on this box.

The new solution is Windows 2K3 Routing and Remote access. The upside is wired employees have virtually no complaints. They can stay up for days. Plus the setup costs were nill. The downside is that wireless 802.11a/b/g employees are having difficulty staying connected, myself included. Personally, I can't stay connected for more than 10 minutes before getting kicked. My one Satellite employee can not connect at all. I even had MS on the phone and they could not figure out how to get it to work. Not to mention that support for this VPN costs me $275 a pop!

My one problem child, as I'm sure many of you IT people can guess, is my CEO. He is the lone satellite user who is also trying to use 802.11b behind that. So it's like a double whamy for my VPN.

My VPN is causing me more work than it should be. Bigger companies would have to have a more reliable solution for employees to connect. People are allowed to access from home on PCs I have no control over and can't standardize what hardware, software, and network equipment they can use.

I've read about a product called V-One that specializes in satellite VPN. That's great but how well will it support my other users?

I'm looking for any advice on how bigger or similar sized companies are handling their VPN solution.

Thanks for your help,
Mike

12 replies

by oz_media

NEC's NEAX 2000 IVS is pretty much the only hardware solution that actually does what it proposes to.

Nortel released the 1500 prematurely without finishig th eR&D, they then folowed with the BCM 2.0, which also only did HALF of what they said it did. They then brought out the BCM 2.5 that actually had MOST of it's stated features working.

NEC did the same thig several times, but as far as working VoIP hardware solutions, the NEC NEAX 200 IVS and een the smaller IPK are the leaders for featureset, preformance, reliability and WORKING features.

I had a BCM in my home for about 6 months, scrapped it and the cliet uistalled a NEAX 200 IVS, full unified messaging, sattelite access when on the ferry etc.

I hae recently installed ad configured the same PBX for a chain of grocery stores all over BC, and it works flawlessly, after MUCH effort though.

nobody is making a simple solution, but there are cheap and pathetic solutions or reliable and working solutions. A three site company just invested $130,000 in a NEAX 2000 IVS with just over 40 phones per location (software phones and extra key codes boosted the price though).

by oz_media

I seem to be havig some N issues lately.

One day I may take the time to learn the formal hand/key positioning (actually I probably won't).

but you'll get the general idea anyhow. :D

by buschman_007

I'm positive I can't convince my higher ups to spend that much money regardless of reliability. I'm thinking a $5k max, preferably under $1K. Also while we do use VoIP between offices, we already have routers in place to handle the traffic. I don't forsee full VoIP anywhere in our near future as our sales tend to be low in number and high in value.

So a unit high in features is not what I'm looking for. High reliability, with the ability to handle high latency connections, such as 802.11 and satellite, is by far the ideal VPN solution for us.

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong in my current setup, which is causing me problems. Perhaps my expectations are unreasonable and no one has stone cold reliable VPN access at any level. I'm totally open to discussion on this issue. But my guess is there are better solutions out there. If I can afford them I want to impliment a better VPN plan in here.

Thanks for the suggestions so far,
Mike

by oz_media

Mind you though, I hae worked with, installed or removed more than 20 different VoIP attempts, none of them live up to expectations.

As far as latency, in the case of the NEAX 2000, you require your own routers but if the system does not sense the appropriate QOS, it will not even boot.

Saving money is fine, but if you are on a budget, your best bet is to forget VoIP and get a decent key system with off-premise satellite.

You won't be doing yourself any favous cutting a budget in VoIP, as many try to do. You sound like you've experieced this first hand already.

As far as the $130,000, that was for multiple ofices with many phones ad UN keycodes.
For your needs (if uder 50 phones) you'd be closer to $30,000.00 US (guesstimate).

Very honestly though, I have never seen someone save money on VoIP and get what they expect, sorry.

by buschman_007

I think we are talking about different technologies. I was referring to Virtual Private Networking. Taking a remote user on his or her own PC and then tunneling a secure channel through the internet to our offices. My apoligies if my initial post wasn't clear.

Mike

by oz_media

Actually I think it's me who needs to apologize and I do mean that sincerely.

There has been a real stir with Tech republic trying to get poeple into a VoIP discussion, several threads are focused on it and with it being my main source of income, perhaps I had VoIP on the brain.

I did notice you were taking VPN,bu to me VoIP IS VPN because most DECENT VoIP PBX's will also provide the VPN, I just got my acronymns screwed up.

I am sorry if I wasted your time, I know my repsponses are completely irrelevant to he topic at hand. I guess I had my head on other things today, sorry about that.

Best of luck with your questionm I really don't have input (due to the VPN/VoIP connections in MY world).

I am actually feeling rather stupid right now, ooops!

OM :-P

by admin

Their tech support is admittedly not very good but it's an excellent product. Cheaper than the Cisco route and lotsa shops use them.

by buschman_007

I am actually using a Sonicwall currently as our as our firewall. So this sounds like an interesting suggestion as the cost would probably be very low. But I am still cautious about a new VPN solution. Cause as you know, everything works in a testing environment. :P

Anywho, has anyone ever used a Sonicwall to VPN. Did you have any satellite customers? Any trouble with user uptime or wireless clients?

Mike

by admin

We use it for mission critical billing software every day with the sonicwall software client at 2 additional locations and it has never gone down itself. The connectivity has, but very rarely.

We are installing a pro 4060 right now to repalce the pro 200 and putting a TZ170 at the client end, so this will fail-over to another DSL line on one end and to a dial-up on the other.

We have ISP's on seperate backbones, so it should very rarely go down if at all.

We use Terminal Services and so it takes very little bandwidth and speed has never been a problem so far.

Hope this helps! :)

by buschman_007

Do you have any satellite customers? if so what has been your experience with their level of speed and reliability? How about 802.11 wireless users?

Why are you upgrading to the 4060? I know it's the replacement for the pro 200, but I was curious if there was a specific reason or set of features that prompted you to upgrade?

Are you saying you use terminal services as an alternative to VPN, or once VPNed in, your users only use terminal services?

Most of my users are doing folder synchronization, outlook sync, VSS, file up/downloading, and other simple tasks like this. I'm about the only user who uses remote desktop, VNC, and other bandwidth heavy applications like that. I just want to develope the most reliable solution for their needs.

Thanks for the input,
Mike

by admin

We have one user that has been atempting to get satellite to work. It has not been reliable enough so far to have us try and set it up. We do have 802.11 users including me and that works great. No bandwidth problems.

We are upgrading for a number of reasons. We were going to have to buy licensing and services for more VPN users anyway and we also wanted a fail-over connection for our ISP. We also had to purchase several additional firewalls for remote locations anyway. The 4060 is WAY faster and has flexible ports, which among other things can do fail over or load-balancing between ISP's. This is a cheap way to offer redundandcy with DSL.

We only use the VPN to run Terminal Services on.
It works well for our users. Our whole network runs roaming desktops, so if I am in any of our 7 locations I have my exact same Outlook, files, folders and everything else immediately upon logon. So does every other user.

In a hotel or South America or one cubby away in the main office its all the same. This cuts WAY down on end user support in my experience. We are also replacing the XP PC's with WYSE workstations when replacements are needed which is way cheaper.

Basically, you don't need much bandwidth to send screenshots, and with 2003 Terminal Server we don't have to wish we could afford Citrix anymore. Drive and Port redirection make it easy for the end user. The company also likes the decreased fax and courier charges as we used to send a lot of info that can now be printed anywhere from anywhere.

Well, I hope that helps. Your scenario is probably different, but if you have any ?'s let me know and if I can be of help I will :)

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