Cisco Cisco ASA 5510 Adaptive Security Appliance Data Sheet

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For these inspection engines to be deployable in a production network environment, they must

meet the demanding performance and network service requirements of today's networks. The

Cisco ASA 5500 Series was built to meet the high performance needs of today's networks,

providing up to 450 Mbps of concurrent protective services. In addition, the stringent service-level

agreements (SLAs) of latency-sensitive voice traffic can be handled with ease through integrated

quality of service (QoS) mechanisms, including a dedicated low-latency queue for voice traffic.

Finally, the availability of the security infrastructure is protected by advanced high-availability

capabilities, including Active/Active failover services, in which network administrators can

capitalize on their redundancy investments by allowing both devices in a failover pair to inspect

application traffic under normal network operation.

The Modular Policy Framework architecture ties together the multitude of application security

inspection engines and network services available in the Cisco ASA 5500 series. Using a modular

services processing architecture enables the use of specific security or network services on a per-

traffic flow basis, delivering highly granular policy controls and with streamlined traffic processing.

The efficiencies of this architecture, as well as software extensibility and hardware extensibility via

user-installable security services modules (SSMs), enables the evolution of existing services as

well as deployment of new services without requiring a platform replacement or performance

compromise. As the architectural foundation of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series, the Modular Policy

Framework architecture enables highly customizable security policies and unprecedented services

extensibility to help protect against the rapidly evolving threat environment.

Conclusions

Networked applications have enabled great gains in business productivity, and promise further

gains still. In order for these gains to be realized, the availability and integrity of applications must

be secured. The Cisco ASA 5500 Series introduces a new class of protection, providing

comprehensive application security without the compromises of traditional solutions. The Cisco

ASA 5500 Series provides comprehensive protocol support, depth of application controls, and tight

integration with network services, tied together in the flexible and high-performance Modular Policy

Framework architecture. This flexibility helps ensure that the Cisco ASA 5500 Series has the

performance to protect today's networks, and the flexibility to protect tomorrow's.

Printed in USA

C11-453493-00 02/08