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This chapter provides a product overview of the Cisco Systems router products. You will find the following information in this chapter:
Complex internetworks have grown past the point where they can depend on equipment from a single vendor. Virtually all organizations connecting local area networks and creating wide area networks today have major commitments to hardware and software from many different vendors. Therefore, current and future internetworking requires products that support multiprotocol, multimedia, and multivendor networks.
Routers from Cisco Systems help LANs and WANs achieve interoperability and connectivity. They operate with equipment from all vendors over most available media. This section describes Cisco-supported protocols and media, as well as the capabilities of Cisco Systems routers for routing, network management, and network security.
Large organizations need the flexibility that multiprotocol networks give them to communicate with diverse hardware and software from many vendors. Cisco Systems routers support many networking protocols, as well as several specific routing protocols for compatibility with other networks. Included are protocols based on open standards and proprietary protocols from a variety of vendors.
One Cisco Systems router can forward packets concurrently from any combination of the following networking protocols:
The Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRPTM), developed by Cisco Systems for
TCP/IP and ISO CLNS (referred to as ISO-IGRP), monitors the network to determine the status of each route and selects the best route for each data packet. Network traffic, path reliability, and path speed all influence route selection. Cisco Systems specifically designed IGRP to address the problems of routing on complex networks with many alternative routes, built of media with diverse bandwidth and delay characteristics.
While running IGRP or ISO-IGRP, Cisco Systems routers can concurrently receive and understand messages from other network segments sent using different routing protocols. For example, IP routing protocols supported by Cisco Systems, in addition to IGRP, include:
Similarly, Cisco routers support concurrent operation of ISO-IGRP and the ISO-standard intermediate system-to-intermediate system (IS-IS).
All Cisco Systems routers support the native dynamic routing protocols used by the various supported network protocols, such as DECnet, Novell IPX, and AppleTalk. This allows compatibility with other vendor's routers. Multiple network protocols and their dynamic routing protocols operate concurrently, sharing the same router and media.
For convenient access to existing networks, Cisco Systems network servers support these industry-standard networking media:
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