By Ki Grinsing

Cisco RV016 is a multi WAN (up to 7 ports) VPN router with 16-port 10/100 Ethernet Switch and supports IPSec VPN technology up to 100 remote connection. Multi WAN routers are ideal solution for growing businesses

Overview

When your business grows, the demand of the internet bandwidth increases. The increasing of the E-mail usage, Voice (VoIP service), browsing activities, video conference, and other internet applications make the latency of WAN connection is getting worse. Traditionally the T1 connection is the solution for high bandwidth WAN usage. Today, you have the alternate solution to increase the bandwidth by implementing multi WAN routers for connecting to many xDSL, Cable, cellular services to form a load balance bandwidth. Cisco RV016 is a multi-WAN router you can consider in implementing the need of multiple WAN routers.

Cisco RV-016

Like routers for business in general, Cisco products are packed with a robust body of metal and designed to be put on the network devices shelf in a special room with a cool temperature.

Highlights

• Multi-WAN connectivity up to 7 ports can be set up for load balancing and connection redundancy
• 16 switched 10/100 Ethernet ports
• Full IPsec VPN capabilities for up to 100 remote connections
• Advanced stateful packet inspection firewall to help keep your network safe

16x Fast Ethernet ports

Cisco RV016 Multi WAN VPN Routers include 16 x autosensing 10/100 Mbps Ethernet ports including 2 dedicated Internet (WAN) ports, 1 DMZ port, 8 LAN ports, and 5 configurable WAN/LAN ports. You can use the two dedicated WAN ports for load-balance internet connection. You can use 1 DMZ port when you need to expose a host computer as a public resource where users from the internet can access the host securely without compromising your private network. For example you can host an FTP server or WEB server connecting to DMZ port in a security boundary, internet users can only access the resources but they cannot access your private network.

VPN Technology

Cisco RV016 Multi WAN routers support the VPN technology to let you create secure tunneling to connect to your private network via public network (aka the internet) up to 100 remote offices connections or remote travelling users. The router supports up to 100 IPSec (Internet Protocol Security) remote connections.

IPSec is a Layer-3 TCP/IP protocol which defines an end-to-end model for data encryption and integrity implemented at the Internet Protocol (IP) level which means only that the hosts at the two endpoints of an IPSec session need to be IPSec-enabled.

For secure connection, these multi wan routers support security encryption including DES (Data Encryption Standard), 3DES, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-128, AES-192, AES-256. AES is stronger encryption which is the replacement standard for DES.

Networking Solution

The figure below shows a simple networking diagram in small office which uses Cisco RV016 Multi WAN router. The two dedicated WAN ports of the router are connected to DSL and Cable modems of broadband internet services. A web server is connected to the DMZ port to allow internet users access the web securely. The Internet users can only access the web server because the server sits in secure boundary (DMZ) separate from your internal network, they cannot reach your file servers.

Cisco RV016 Multi WAN routers are designed for small businesses which demand high bandwidth that increase in line with the growing of the businesses. For small offices, you may consider Cisco RV 120W wireless VPN router which includes dual WAN ports for load balancing or smart backup link.

You may also consider new Linksys cloud router – Linksys EA4500 N900 cloud router – check the link.