1

Our company is relocating soon. We have about 60ish employees. Our current phone system is VOIP, but all hosted. We only own the phones (old, mostly incompatible Cisco 7940s). We are looking into other options for the new location. We have been told by a prospective vendor that we need to switch from our SonicWall NSA 2400 to a Cisco SRP541W for their system. We have remote users utilizing the SonicWall’s SSLVPN to remotely connect to the LAN. I’m having trouble finding reviews on this Cisco unit. I know Cisco is superior in most ways, but I need to convey the “warm and fuzzy” to my supervisor and company owner. Has anyone used this router or know someone who has? Will it support 25 secure VPN connections? Any information would be helpful.

Thanks,

A.G. Rappe

Systems Administrator

@Cisco

5 Spice ups
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I’d get competing quotes for other systems. Most Cisco systems are way overpriced for the performance, and they’re small business line of products is somewhere between frustrating and terrible.

1 Spice up
3

Them be fighting words.

4

Thanks for the info. We’ve had quotes from several companies. This is the first one we are going to go look at. Most, however still tell us we will need a new router.

5

Did the vendor say why the NSA 2400 would not work? The SRP541W is a $400 device. The NSA 2400 is a $2000 device. I think it might come from the vendor not being familiar with the NSA services of products.

The SRP541W has phone ports on the device. Which is different from what you are using now with just IP VOIP phones across your connection. I would ask for a diagram from them on what the layout would look like.

Also you can use the NSA 2400 and the SRP541W at the same time as long as your Internet Provider has given you more then one IP address. You can setup the phones on a different IP subnet and have them talk to the SRP541W and use the NSA 2400 as you always have.

With the above being said why aren’t you sticking with your current VOIP vendor. As long as you have IP access you should be good to go from the new location.

6

That is the consensus from a lot of vendors. They would love to sell you another high priced piece of equipment :stuck_out_tongue:

Here is a thread dealing with VoIP and SonicWALL: http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/141442-voip-issues-through-sonicwall-firewall . The consensus is if you’re running 5.8 or newer and you turn off SIP-ALG it will work fine.

7

Please, oh, please do not equate bigger with better. Sonic wall is a solid product line and continues to be under Dell’s umbrella. It all depends on the true throughput that you need vs. price. I have a bigger ES6500 but have been using Sonicwall since the Pro300 days. Used to run a Cisco shop and will stand by Sonicwall for what it is worth. If you can run on the 2400 now and the line provider can provide the same interface that you have now, you will be fine.

8

Great information! I can walk into the demo with my eyes open. Thanks!

9

GranPaGTS - Our current VOIP provider is also our ISP and we have tons of problems with them ranging from major over-billing issues to being ignored by their support personnel to a complete lack of usage information. We have been counting the days until we get to move and dump them.

10

You probably want to use the device they recommend, this will avoid finger pointing when you have issues.
As suggested earlier, ask for more than one IP address and use the SonicWall for your data VLAN and SSLVPN.

11

What we have found with these deployments is this: VoIP works great, when it works. Most people (including the many of the technicians at the providers) cannot do any troubleshooting outside of a few specific pieces of equipment that they know well. Call it tunnel vision.

In the big picture, its understandable, to a degreee. However that means that you will be limited to the equipment they suggest/offer/push/blackmail. We had one project (ISP provided SIP trunks) and and we gave. Turned out the router couldn’t handle the multiple WAN connections the business needed. Once we got it setup and tested out their settings, we just copied the settings over to our open source router and it was all done.

So in the end its a choice of who will be responsible for what equipment when something goes “bump” in the night.

12

We had a lot of bad experience (i’m a service provider) with NSA’s with VOIP and I think that is why they are proposing another unit. Either way, you can still keep your NSA for VPN without a problem by setting it or Cisco on another public IP address and applying a correct routing statement - which I’m sure the provider will help you with. This is a pretty typical configuration in most large environments so I would not point fingers just because they want to “sell” you a Cisco. Remember, since they are the provider, its easier for them to support a Cisco hardware/software than SonicWall.