Cisco® today announced the availability of the Cisco ASA 5580 Series Adaptive Security Appliances, the company’s highest-performing security appliance offering.

The Cisco ASA 5580 Series uniquely addresses the challenge of handling high-performance security events 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.

The new Cisco ASA 5580-40 is a super-high-performance security platform equally well suited for deployment as a highly scalable firewall with up to 1 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). When clustered, the Cisco ASA 5580 Series can scale to support up to 100,000 remote access users.

Cisco ASA 5580-20 performs with half of Cisco ASA 5580-40, 5 Gbps/s which can be upgraded easily to 5580-40 when required for higher performance. This flexibility is important for customers when choosing where to invest.

Cisco ASA 5580-20 and 5580-40 have identical chassis. Cisco ASA 5580 supports both single and dual AC power supplies and redundant fans together with zero-downtime software-upgrades and active/active or active/stand failover. Cisco ASA 5580 has 6 slots for interface expansion cards and 3 slots for next expansion, 2 ports gigabit Ethernet for management, 1 serial port and 2 USB ports. Regarding interface cards, there are currently 3 kinds of cards which meet high demand in connection including: one card 10/100/1000 ethernet 4 ports and 24 interfaces in one chassis, one Gigabit Ethernet fiber card 4 ports and one 10 Gigabit Ethernet fiber card two ports.