[c-nsp] 2851 throughput / guidance

[Alex Campbell]

Does anyone have any advice/experiences they could share with running
Cisco 2851s as border routers on a small hosting network?

We're looking at 2851s with 768MB DRAM and Advanced Security featureset.
We would be running two on our border, each taking a full internet
routing table from a different upstream and some IX prefixes.

We won't be doing QoS, voice, VPNs etc, but we will have the stateful
firewall features turned on as well as reasonably long ACLs.

About 95% of the traffic through the devices will be HTTP and HTTPS,
probably in the 10mbps - 30mbps range.  The 2851s wouldn't be a really
long term solution, and once we start to hit the 70-90mbps range we
would be ready to replace them with something much bigger.

Also, what are the real life advantages/disadvantages with using the
HWIC-4ESW in this situation instead of the frighteningly expensive
HWIC-1FEs?

The 2851 isn't my ideal solution but the 38xxs are too pricey.  A refurb
7204 with NPE-400 is only slightly more expensive to purchase than a new
2851, but Smartnet on it is 5x more expensive.  I'd love to go with a
Juniper J-4350-JB which is the same price as the 2851 and is much better
value, but it might be hard locally to find capable Juniper people.  Any
other suggestions would be most welcome.

Thanks,

Alex