Advice on connectivity for multiple offices
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We currently only have one location in San Diego but will soon have a second office in another part of town as well as one in Las Vegas before summer. We will also have a 100mbps link to a local SD data center/colo for offsite backup in place by then. I was planning on just getting basic internet at each of the 'remote' offices and using OpenVPN back to our main office or colo, or would anyone have other recommendations/suggestions? VPN/Local traffic will be mainly SQL and Shoretel VOIP. We also use google apps for email etc.
Should I be looking at point to point connections or will public internet be okay for a setup like this? Any considerations as to DC/colo selection? Their carriers? We have TW (not TW telecom) locally, but don't think they have any presence in LV. As far as I could tell there are no common DC/colo providers in LV and SD.
I appreciate any input.
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Recommendations like that may be hard to come by unless someone else in all those regions can speak up about the local carriers.
In general though, OpenVPN should work fine as long as you have enough CPU on your firewall to handle encrypting at the line speed at each location (or at least the fastest possible between two sites).
Even if you had a "private" link between cities I'd still be tempted to run a VPN over it.
Probably better to have a mesh VPN where each site connects to each other site directly, rather than routing through a single connection back to a central hub. Both setups would work, but a hub-and-spoke setup will use more bandwidth in the long run if the two "remote" sites need to talk back and forth a lot.
