Cisco: ASA 5580 Series Adaptive Security Appliances

Ahmad

Cisco has sent word that they will be making available the ASA 5580 Series Adaptive Security Appliances, which is by far their highest-performing security appliance offering. It is basically a security platform that can be used to not only deploy firewall with up to 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) of throughput but also 10,000 user remote-access concentrator for IP Security (IPsec)-based virtual private networks (VPN) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

Mick Scully is the vice president of product management for Cisco’s Security Technology Group. He says, “The advent of Web 2.0 applications and a huge increase in the number of connections is driving the need for an increasingly high-powered security infrastructure. Many organizations have been unable to keep up their security posture in the face of burgeoning traffic growth. Cisco’s security strategy involves delivering products that can meet these needs. We recently delivered a data center-caliber intrusion prevention sensor for greater packet inspection, and the Cisco ASA 5580 represents the latest offering from Cisco to provide high-performance firewalling and VPN connectivity. Together, these products bring the promise of our Self-Defending Network strategy to life in high-performance, data-intensive environments.”

Cisco ASA 5580 Series Adaptive Security Appliances

Cisco ASA 5580 Series Adaptive Security Appliances

Dennis Tokarski is the manager, telecommunications and network Operations for Del Monte Foods. He quotes, “With the explosion of IP traffic, the security dangers targeting data center networks, servers and databases have increased exponentially. Cisco’s ASA 5580 is designed to protect our most critical and sensitive resources: information assets housed in data centers. Cisco’s ASA 5580 offers the right combination of performance, integration and scalability that directly addresses complex data center security challenges.”

The ASA 5580 Series Adaptive Security Appliances by Cisco has been made for media-rich, highly transactional and latency-sensitive applications as it has the highest connection rates in the industry, very large policy configurations, and very low latency. In fact, it is suitable for the security needs of organizations with the most demanding applications, such as voice, video, data backup, scientific or grid computing, and financial trading systems.

Here are some details of the Cisco ASA 5580 Series:

The Cisco ASA 5580 Series consists of three offerings: The Cisco ASA 5580-40 security appliance, Cisco ASA 5580-20 security appliance, and the Cisco ASA 5580-20 Remote Access VPN Concentrator. The top-of-the-line Cisco ASA 5580-40 offers up to two million simultaneous connections, 750,000 security policies and 10 Gbps of firewall throughput scaling up to 20 Gbps for data-intensive applications such as video sharing or storage-area networking. Both Cisco ASA 5580-20 models support up to one million simultaneous connections and 5 Gbps firewall throughput. All models deliver industry-leading connection handling rates of 150,000 connections per second, offer ultra-low latency as low as 30 microseconds, and continue to perform even in strenuous, mixed-traffic environments. This gives enterprise IT departments the coveted performance and speed without sacrificing efficiency or reliability.

There is no information on the pricing of the Cisco ASA 5580 Series Adaptive Security Appliances. But whatever be the price, it would be great to have a product that has support for Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows Mobile, with other operating environments.