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Hardware Selection
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The issue of availability is another critical factor in the branch office. You must know how often
and how long a connection will be needed and if a backup is necessary. The central office
generally uses links that are always available or highly reliable, whereas the branch office might
not want to pay for that reliability.
Remote Office or Home Office Installations
An installation at either of these locations is likely to have a fixed function device that was
chosen with cost as a main factor. Once the election of the access method is made, it is unlikely
to change in the near term.
The traffic or data that exits the RO or HO can usually be categorized very neatly. An example
of this categorization would be a remote salesperson who must gain download corporate pricing
and upload sales data and email.
The overriding consideration at these offices is generally cost. In addition, the RO must
maintain a method for authentication to the branch or central site and justify the connection
time to a central or branch office. In general, these offices would use a dial-on-demand
methodology to minimize WAN charges.
Hardware Selection
When the research is done and the location is selected, the last step is to select a router that
meets the specifications created.
Cisco is continually updating the product line for all types of WAN scenarios. The best way to
stay current with the offerings available for RAS solutions is at the Cisco web site at
www.cisco.com.
The products in the following section represent some of the current offerings for Remote Access
environments. The successful CCNP or CCDP candidate should be aware of the capabilities
and limitations of each product family and where the devices from each family can be
implemented.
Product Families: Capabilities and Limitations
The Cisco 700 series family of routers supports IP and IPX routing over ISDN. Routers from
this family have no scalability for adding ports and were designed for ROs and SOHOs.