Designed as a key component of the Cisco Self-Defending Network, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series provides proactive threat defense that stops attacks before they spread through the network, controls network activity and application traffic, and delivers flexible VPN connectivity. The result is a powerful multifunction network security appliance family that provides the security breadth and depth for protecting small and medium-sized business and enterprise networks while reducing the overall deployment and operations costs and complexities associated with providing this new level of security.

The Cisco ASA 5500 Series helps businesses more effectively and efficiently protect their networks while delivering exceptional investment protection via the following key elements:

• Market-proven security and VPN capabilities---Full-featured, high-performance firewall, intrusion prevention system (IPS), network antivirus, and IP Security/Secure Sockets Layer (IPSec/SSL) VPN technologies deliver robust application security, user- and application-based access control, worm and virus mitigation, malware protection, and remote user/site connectivity.

• Extensible Adaptive Identification and Mitigation services architecture---Leveraging a modular services processing and policy framework, AIM enables the application of specific security or network services on a per traffic flow basis, delivering highly granular policy controls and anti-x protection with streamlined traffic processing.

• Reduced deployment and operations costs---Multifunction appliance allows for platform, configuration, and management standardization, helping to decrease the costs of deployment and ongoing operations.


The Cisco ASA 5500 Series takes advantage of more than 20 years of Cisco networking leadership and innovation, and delivers a wide range of intelligent networking services for seamless integration into today's diverse network environments. Key network integration capabilities include:

• Layer 2 transparent firewall---Provides the ability to rapidly deploy Cisco ASA 5500 Series appliances into existing networks without requiring any addressing changes. Delivers high-performance stealth Layers 2-7 security services and provides protection against network-layer attacks with integration in complex routing, high availability, and multicast environments.

• Services virtualization---Enables the logical partitioning of a single Cisco ASA 5500 Series appliance into multiple virtual firewalls, each with its own unique policies and administration. This capability is ideal for enterprises consolidating multiple firewalls into a single Cisco ASA 5500 Series appliance, or for service providers that offer managed firewall or hosting services.

• 802.1q-based VLAN support---Provides easy integration into switched network environments.

• Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) dynamic routing services---Improve networking resiliency by detecting network outages within seconds, and routing around them.

• Protocol-Independent Multicast (PIM) Sparse Mode v2 and bidirectional PIM routing support---Provide secure delivery of mission-critical real-time enterprise applications, collaborative computing applications, and streaming multimedia services.

• IPv6 support---Allows secure deployment of next-generation IPv6 networks.

• Quality of Service (QoS)---Low-Latency Queuing (LLQ) and Traffic Policing features support applications with demanding QoS requirements, such as voice or video, helping to ensure an end-to-end network QoS policy. Latency-sensitive traffic can be prioritized ahead of file transfer and other more delay-tolerant traffic.

• IP phone "zero-touch provisioning" services---Simplifies IP phone deployments by helping the phones register with the correct Cisco CallManager systems and download any additional configuration information and software images.

• Resilient architecture---Provides businesses with both stateful Active/Active and Active/Standby high-availability services, as well as VPN device clustering, to help maximize throughput and network uptime

Product Specifications:

–Firewall Throughput : Up to 300 Mbps
–Concurrent Threat Mitigation Throughput (Firewall + Anti-x Services): Up to 150 Mbps, with AIP-SSM-10
–3DES/AES VPN Throughput : Up to 170 Mbps
–Connections: 32,000/64,000*
–IPSec VPN Peers: 50/150*
–WebVPN Peers : 50/150*
–Integrated I/O Ports : 3 Fast Ethernet + 1 management/5 Fast Ethernet
–Virtual Interfaces (VLANs) 0/10*
–Security Contexts Not supported
–High Availability/Scalability: Not supported / Active/Standby*

* Available through an upgrade license.