New from Cisco – ASA 5580 Series Adaptive Security Appliances

Cisco 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 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.