Allied Telesyn International unveiled a low-cost router for connecting branch offices to a main corporate site.
The AT-AR740 is intended to sit in a corporate headquarters and aggregate branch or regional office traffic. It supports ISDN, frame relay and up to four T-1 lines.
The 19-inch (1u), rack-mountable device has two 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet ports, two port interface card slots, and a network service module bay, which can support two more PICs. The device can support up to four T-1 ports or six ISDN ports.
The AT-AR740 is a good choice for setting up a WAN without spending a lot of money, says James Mustarde, marketing director for Allied Telesyn. He says that the router's base price, listed at US$2,695, beats competitive products, such as Cisco's 2621, by up to 15 percent.
The device also serves as a VPN termination point, with support for Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol. It also can be installed with Triple-DES and firewall software for added security. Mini accelerator cards (MAC) that do hardware-based Triple-DES and compression also are available.
T-1 PICs cost $795; and ISDN, Ethernet, synchronous and asynchronous PICs are priced at $255 each. The Network Service Module with its two additional PIC slots costs $995. The DES software costs $495, and the Nemesis firewall software costs $255. Triple-DES MACs for encryption only, and compression plus encryption, cost $395 and $495 respectively. The AT-AR740 is available now, along with all of the listed hardware and software. According to Mustarde, a voice-over-IP module will be available in the first quarter of next year.