jheary
Distinguished Systems Engineer

Cisco Announces ASA Service Module for the Cat6K

Analysis
Mar 31, 20112 mins

The ASA Services Modules provide up to 64Gbps FW for the Cat6K chassis

Today Cisco announced the ASA Services module for its Catalyst 6500 switching line. This module runs the same code as the other Cisco ASA form factors so going forward you’ll have the same code base across all of your ASA platforms. Here are the specs for the ASA-SM firewall as taken from their datasheet: With twice the performance and four times the session count of competitive network security modules, it supports up to: • 20 Gbps maximum firewall throughput (max) • 16 Gbps of maximum firewall throughput (multi-protocol) • 300,000 connections per second • 10 million concurrent connections • 250 security contexts • 1,000 VLANs Pretty impressive numbers by any measure. The FW performance is about four times greater than the Cisco FWSM (5.5Gbps) that preceded it. Also, the ASA-SM is about 10 times the concurrent connection capacity than the Cisco FWSM. You can put up to four Cisco ASA-SM into a Cat6K and scale this up to 64Gbps in a single chassis! The Blade will work in any Cat6K E chassis or the VE 9 slot chassis. Pricing and Availability not yet publicly available. For More information See here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11621/index.html

The opinions and information presented here are my PERSONAL views and not those of my employer. I am in no way an official spokesperson for my employer.

More from Jamey Heary: Credit Card Skimming: How thieves can steal your card info without you knowing it Google Nexus One vs. Top 10 Phone Security RequirementsWhy you should always shred your boarding pass Video rental records are afforded more privacy protections than your online dataThe truth about new SSL attacks 2009 Top Urban Legends in IT Security/a>Go to Jamey’s Blog for more articles on security.

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jheary

Jamey Heary, CCIE #7680, is a Distinguished Systems Engineer at Cisco Systems. Jamey sits on the PCI Security Standards Council- Board of Advisors where he provides strategic and technical guidance for future PCI standards. Jamey has authored several security books, his latest is Cisco ISE for BYOD and Secure Unified Access. He also has a patent on a new DDoS mitigation and firewall IP reputation technique. Jamey leads numerous security advisory boards for Cisco Systems and is a founding member of the Colorado Healthcare InfoSec Users Group. He is also recognized as a Distinguished Speaker at Cisco Live. He has been working in the IT field for 19 years and in IT security for 15 years.

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