Friday, July 23, 2021

Office Network Upgrade (Ideas Validation)

Just joined a new company and they want me to upgrade their network.

The current infrastructure consists of a 1Gbps symmetrical Fiber WAN link on another floor (that we don't have control of) going into a Linksys home router that we have. That is it. No firewall, nothing. Wifi speeds are 100Mbps or so. Office is 1k sqft or so.

I want to go enterprise grade because, although the company has 50ish employees currently, they plan to double to 100 by EoY. Most people work hybrid and 20 or so are in the office daily, the rest are remote. There isn't a defined budget for the project and I have been asked to present a few options to compare.

To be honest, because I feel like it is one of the more futureproof solutions, I was going to try to push a Meraki solution. I was thinking of an MS120-8FP + MX84 + 2 MR20 APs to cover the security and access needs that they don't know they need. I have no doubt that an MX64 would get the job done currently but with the planned growth I don't want a bottleneck in the future.

Is there anything I am missing here? I've worked with networks before but this'll be my first complete build. They currently pay NordVPN to manage their VPN but want to bring it in house as Nord is quite expensive.

Two other options I am exploring are Ubiquiti and Aruba. Ubiquiti due to the cost savings (but the added headaches when something goes wrong) and Aruba because it is a decent competitor to Cisco.



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