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Cisco Pushes Firewall and VPN Performance to New Heights With New Adaptive Security Appliances
Top-of-the-Line Cisco ASA 5580 Series Delivers Data Center-Class Performance With Firewall and SSL/IPSec VPN Capabilities in a Single Platform
| Source: Cisco Systems, Inc.
SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - January 22, 2008) - To address enterprises' insatiable appetite
for high performance and scalable network security, Cisco® (NASDAQ : CSCO )
today announced the availability of the Cisco ASA 5580 Series Adaptive
Security Appliances, the company's highest-performing security appliance
offering. The new Cisco ASA 5580 is a super-high-performance security
platform equally well suited for deployment as a highly scalable firewall
with up to 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) of throughput, as well as a 10,000
user remote-access concentrator for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and IP
Security (IPsec)-based virtual private networks (VPN).
The Internet and the advent of Web 2.0 applications has heralded an
explosion of new device types and extensive use of complex content which is
straining existing security infrastructures. Frequently, today's security
systems cannot meet the high transaction rates or depth of security
policies necessary in these environments. As a result, information
technology (IT) staff often struggle to provide basic security services let
alone keeping up with the magnitude of security events generated by these
systems for necessary monitoring and auditing, and compliance purposes.
Super High Performance for Data Center Environments and Large Enterprises
The Cisco ASA 5580 Series is designed to protect these media-rich, highly
transactional and latency-sensitive applications at the enterprise data
center and Internet gateway by providing a security solution with
market-leading throughput, the highest connection rates in the industry,
very large policy configurations, and very low latency. This makes the
appliance highly 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.
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.
The Cisco ASA 5580 Series uniquely addresses the challenge of
high-performance security event handling through advancements in Cisco's
NetFlow v9 technology. NetFlow v9 for Cisco ASA 5580 builds upon Cisco's 11
years of innovation in NetFlow network telemetry with new extensions added
for security events, greatly reducing the number and size of individual
security event messages while simplifying event aggregation. NetFlow v9
security events can be sent to a Cisco NetFlow Collector, third-party
aggregation systems supporting NetFlow v9 security events, or, in the
future, Cisco Security Monitoring, Analysis and Response System for
advanced security event correlation and reporting. With NetFlow v9, the
Cisco ASA 5580 Series enables security event management to meet security
monitoring and compliance requirements in the most demanding high-speed
environments.
Highly Scalable Remote Access Solution for Demanding Environments
The Cisco ASA 5500 family is the industry's only product line that can
provide both full IPsec and clientless, portal-based and client-based SSL
VPN remote access capabilities. When combined with the core functionality
of the Cisco ASA 5580 Series high-performance firewalling, the platform
provides a single security appliance that protects a distributed
enterprise's central data center sites as well as remote locations and
mobile users. While customers can add VPN remote access services to any
Cisco ASA 5500 model, the Cisco ASA 5580-20 Remote Access VPN Concentrator
provides for a simple purchase by combining both the appliance and the SSL
license for supporting 10,000 concurrent users in a single platform. When
clustered, the Cisco ASA 5580 Series can scale to support up to 100,000
remote access users.
The ASA Cisco 5580 Series' flexible and scalable VPN deployment model
supports all endpoint and user types, including support for Microsoft
Windows Vista, Windows Mobile, among other operating environments, and
clientless SSL and client-based SSL VPNs to accommodate teleworker and
partner connectivity for anytime, anywhere access to critical corporate
data. It offers a variety of remote access methods including Transport
Layer Security, Datagram TLS, IPsec, and clientless communications
providing significant deployment flexibility. The product's unified
graphical management interface simplifies the administration and policy
control, providing IT teams with an easy-to-use appliance that handles
heavy traffic loads.
"With the explosion of IP traffic, the security dangers targeting data
center networks, servers and databases have increased exponentially," said
Dennis Tokarski, manager, telecommunications and network operations, Del
Monte Foods. "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 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," said Mick Scully, vice president of product management for
Cisco's Security Technology Group. "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."
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