Cisco Ups the Security Appliance Ante
Late last month, Cisco Systems Inc. announced its highest-performance security appliance offering to date, the new ASA 5580 Series.The ASA 5580 is a high-performance security platform that Cisco says is suitable for use as either a scalable firewall (with up to 20 Gbps of overall throughput) or as a 10,000-user remote-access concentrator for secure sockets layer (SSL) and IP security (IPsec)-based virtual private networks (VPNs).
Industry talking-heads give Cisco’s newest — and highest-performance — security appliance generally favorable marks. “[T]he new products will significantly extend Cisco’s ability to address the high end of the firewall and VPN markets. The new ASA 5580-40 will deliver an order of magnitude improvement in firewall throughput compared to the existing top-end ASA 5550 appliance,” said Andrew Braunberg, an analyst with consultancy Current Analysis.
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