CISCO router ideas for a 350Mbps circuit - LAB

[christian cundall]

Hi Everyone

I have been researching the forums and some models come to mind.

Basically i am after a CISCO router that will happily handle a 350Mbps internet circuit.

- Will have about 30 NAT and PAT rules

- 5 vlans

- 50 users.

 - slash 29 wan subnet

Regards cost: It would be based on what is available on ebay as this would be for a home / lab environment.

At the moment i am looking at the 3800 series router, but ideally something that is a little smaller - 1u would be ideal.

Thanks

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Hmm, an eBay Cisco router that can happily handle 350 Mbps, ideally also 1U, not very likely.

I've attached an "old" router performance fact sheet that will show the performance of the older routers (including the 3800).

[christian cundall]

Thanks for the tech note, i had come across that before and wondered how believable those figures were. We have to read them with CISCO being cautious and with all features of the router enabled.

I have a 1921 at the moment in the lab and quite often get 190Mbps.

I also did not want a 2u piece of tin in my study, those are noisy enough in our datacentre + heat + power.

[Joseph W. Doherty · Accepted solution]

Actually the numbers are generally accurate, and its without using any "options", but they do use minimum Ethernet frame size. Throughput will often jump (a lot) as you increase the frame size. See the top of the document for the specifics of how performance is being measured.

Also keep in mind, you generally need to allow for two way (i.e. duplex) performance. I.e. a "350 Mbps" WAN link might permit up to 700 Mbps utilization. The document's performance is aggregate.

Although it doesn't have number for many and/or older devices, the attached white paper shows how much capacity can vary for different conditions.