In the beginning of networking, the choices available to a network administrator were very limited.

Routers were available for routing, repeaters for repeating, and Cat5 cables for connecting it all to the servers and the hosts.

WANS were created by setting up banks of modems on either end of a connection. Things have changed.

Today there is a wide array of network devices that are capable of providing very granular access, segmenting and isolating those segments, reducing the collisions, and speeding up response times.

Some of those devices are narrow, single-purpose devices and others are "Swiss Army knife" devices that are multifunctional.

There is a significant amount of overlap in functionality between these devices, making it far more challenging for network architects to select from among these devices.

For this discussion, explore the options that are available for use in a modern network. Include in the discussion the context in which these selections can be applied.

Consider the benefits and challenges related to the use of "best of breed" single-function devices and to the selection of multifunctional devices.

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