What to buy | New business equipment

Dear LTS forum :wave: .

I just started my own new company where we manage high profile esports tournaments.

I have been looking for a while now what network gear to get and currently have my eyes on the USG and a 24 port UniFi switch.

Our Use Case:
We have a small datacenter (2/3 rack at my daytime job) where we currently have some hardware, witch is: 2x HP c7000 BladeCenters with blades inside 1 SuperMicro 2027 witch will be our datastore and current router.

We need to move all this equipment to a 12 u moveable rack to bring to our events.

The network equipment need to be easy to configure and manage. Can be both GUI/ CLI.
One of the main criteria is that it needs to be cheap
We need at least 24 ports because the BladeCenter is setup with passthrough network switches so each blade needs its own cable and there are 2 modules In each blade server and we have 2

Come at me! Show me what to buy!

What type of WAN speeds do you have? What kind of configurability do you need on the firewall? The USG is good but very basic, and I wouldn’t use it with more than a couple hundred meg WAN connection. You could go with the USG Pro if you need more throughput. If you need more fine grained configuration, go with pfsense and the Netgate sg-1100 or sg-3100. You could also build your own server with stuff from ebay if cost is that big an issue.

Call this in to them for billable services. Sounds like you started a company and made promises you don’t know how to fulfill. Sorry for being honest.

One of the main criteria is that it needs to be cheap. <— That never ends in a good result. “Cheap” = A lot of constant support calls.

Wish you well on this one.

Currently we have symmetric gigabit at both the Datacenter and the locations.
We don’t need the full speed but more is better

Need to add a lot of allow and deny rules to outside networks. And this might be possible in the USG, but have never used it

@itsmikeboyd thanks for the comment. By cheap, I mean that the router or switch should not cost over 800$. At my day job I Handel, a lot of our hardware and know the prizes of some of this.

I have a budget of around 1200$ for both the switch and router at max.

You could easily implement a PfSense solution for less than 800$. I’d go the PfSense router at that price point.You could easily implement a PFSense router and switch well under 800.

@bjerrecs I think you could probably do what you need with a USG, but their firewall is a little goofy. So I think it would be easier in pfsense. If you just need firewall rules without IPS/IDS/pfbocker stuff the sg-3100 will get you gig routing. If you need more stuff turned on you could bump up to the sg-5100.

You’re budget is perfectly reasonable. Some people want to do all this for $200 or something like that. Which isn’t so reasonable. I’m assuming you don’t need peo for this application. So you should be in the $550-900 neighborhood depending on which router you go with.