[PLUG] Network gateway solution for small business?

[Greg Helledy <gregsonh@gra-inc.com>]

We have an office with about 20 employees.  We currently use a PC with a 
Windows-based application to handle connecting our LAN to the internet. 
 The hardware and software/OS install are both aging and reliability is 
declining, which is proving to be a problem.

The solutions I see are:
1. buy a new PC and do a fresh install of the OS and application (both 
of which we already have licenses for)
2. buy a new PC and install an OSS alternative (pfSense?)
3. buy a dedicated gateway/router/firewall appliance

We are leaning towards 3. for a few reasons:

a. the router will be easier to maintain, take up less space, produce 
less noise and heat, and consume less electricity than a PC
b. it looks like we can get a small business-class router for around 
(~$500) the price of a basic PC
c. we can get an appliance that does out-of-the-box the things we care 
about, and don't need the additional flexibility that a PC would provide.

The things we need are:
*gateway with firewall that can be configured to do port forwarding of 
incoming connections
*ability to handle 2 WANs simultaneously.  We have service from two 
providers, for redundancy.  We don't need any complex traffic 
shaping/load balancing, just need traffic to go to ISP B when ISP A is down.
*DHCP that can assign fixed IPs to networked machines by MAC
*antivirus scanning of traffic, to protect the Windows-based machines on 
the LAN
*a built-in wireless access point would be nice, but is not necessary 
(we can just plug something in).

I have started doing some research but surprisingly, flaky firmware 
seems to be a frequent user complaint even in this class of device.  I 
love my tomato router at home but we need to stick with factory firmware 
for this application.  If anyone has a recommendation, please send it my 
way.  Thanks in advance, and sorry for the interruption.

--
Greg Helledy
GRA, Incorporated
P:  +1 215-884-7500
F:  +1 215-884-1385
www.gra.aero

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