Cisco 891F for LAN

[matthew1991]

Hi i have to had to post this question here because as per usual Cisco's site does not provide a straight answer or any insight as to the performance of the LAN cards on these routers (from what i can find anyway)

Just to note i am not concerned about WAN speeds i know the 891F will cover what i need.

I have been looking at the possibility of upgrading my LAN switch to a gigabit switch to benefit from higher speed LAN connectivity. But i have figured that if the gigabit LAN ports on a 891F can provide an improved performance then i could just buy the router and use this as a replacement for both my home switch and router.

I don't have many devices connected up to the LAN anyway i have 4 currently so the 8 ports the 891F provides is plenty.

Currently on my home LAN i have:

Switch: WS-C3560V2-24PS-S (100MB)

Router: Cisco 887VA

In short my questions are, would using the 891F's Gigabit switch ports provide higher LAN speeds than 3560V2, do these cards have ASIC's like a normal switch has.

Or would i be better off going and buying something like a 3750G?

Thanks

[Georg Pauwen]

Hello,

I have been looking around to find anything on the ASICs used in the 891F, but just like you couldn't find much.

if you are just looking for faster LAN throughput, the dedicated Gigabit switch will definitely be faster. However, the question is if you actually notice the difference. You would have to switch to 10G to really see an improvement. If you only have 4 devices, I would say the router is sufficient. What kind of traffic is flowing between your LAN hosts ? Unless you have massive, constant data transfers, I don't see what a dedicated switch would add for just a few clients...

[matthew1991]

Hi Georg,

Thanks for the response, the traffic is mainly general web traffic and the occasional file transfer and some downloads.

It's pretty poor on Cisco's part not to provide any information on them, i know someone who can log onto an 891F so if you know some commands to run for reference i can ask them to, the only thing to note is the environment which they are being used in has dedicated switches and will not be using the LAN ports.

[Reza Sharifi]

Hi,

It really all comes down to your WAN speed. If your WAN speed is 50 or 100Mb, that is all you are limited to no matter how many devices and haw many gig ports you have. Even if you get a switch i.e 3750X, which will give you 24 or 48 10/100/1000 ports, you are still limited to that WAN speed.

HTH

[matthew1991]

Really? i am talking specifically about LAN speed here though, so switching packets on one VLAN between the Ports on the Router.

How would my WAN speed come into the equation? 

[Reza Sharifi]

I was reading what you noted in your other post:

 "the traffic is mainly general web traffic and the occasional file transfer and some downloads."

I am assuming web traffic and file transfer download is from the outside (Internet), if that is the case you can only send and receive traffic up to the WAN speed.

HTH

[matthew1991]

Ah i see, yes for this it will be the WAN speed i should of worded my other post better.

I am only concerned about LAN speed to be honest and local file transfers when considering whether i buy a Router with gig ports or buy a dedicated switch.

So far it's looking like the router i just need someone who has an 891F or even an 897va to do some file transfers locally and tell me what transfer speeds are like and if it's suitable to use as a switch and router.

[Reza Sharifi]

So far it's looking like the router i just need someone who has an 891F or even an 897va to do some file transfers locally and tell me what transfer speeds are like and if it's suitable to use as a switch and router.

Exactly. One other thing to consider is that usually switches are faster than routers specially if it is needed for local transfers. 

HTH

[matthew1991 · Accepted solution]

I ended up buying a Cisco 897VA with a POE daughter card and 125W PSU off ebay which turned out relatively cheap.

I have done some local transfer tests transferring video files over the LAN on the same VLAN between two of the on board LAN Gigabit switch ports.

80GB of video took around 11-12 mins to transfer at a rate of 110MB's per second, in my opinion this is good and was much faster than what i was getting from the 3560.

I am also now getting the full speeds over the WAN with my provider Plus net so i am getting 66Mb download / 18.5Mb upload.

If any of you need me to run any commands for hardware information let me know.

Here is some outputs incase it's helpful:

Cisco C897VA-K9 (revision 1.0) with 944128K/104448K bytes of memory.
1 DSL controller
1 Ethernet interface
9 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces
1 ISDN Basic Rate interface
1 ATM interface
1 Virtual Private Network (VPN) Module
DRAM configuration is 32 bits wide
255K bytes of non-volatile configuration memory.
250880K bytes of ATA System CompactFlash (Read/Write)

GATEWAY-ROUTER#show controllers gigabitEthernet 0
Interface Switch Routed Port
Hardware is PQUICC3 P1021S