Delivering on its Cisco SAFE blueprint for secure e-business, Cisco Systems has announced several high-end additions to its Cisco Secure PIX Firewall and VPN router families. The new products underscore Cisco`s security strategy to provide organisations with scalable, flexible and comprehensive methods of reliably and cost-effectively competing in e-business today.
"With the continued expansion of the Internet economy, it`s clear that customers are going to need robust security solutions that go beyond anything most people imagined in terms of performance," said Raymond Janse van Rensburg, systems engineer at Cisco Systems SA. "Gigabit firewalls are quickly becoming a required element of e-business data centre infrastructures, which represents a rapidly expanding revenue opportunity for networking vendors."
The products additions include:
PIX Firewall 535
This is Cisco`s first Gigabit firewall and is designed for large enterprises and service provider customers, offering security and reliability. It supports up to 1 Gigabit of RAM, eight-Gigabit Ethernet or 10/100 Fast Ethernet interfaces, and a VPN Accelerator Card. Customers can opt to fail-over to a hot-standby, redundant PIX, or add a redundant, hot exchangeable power supply. The PIX 535 can be integrated with the PIX Operating System (OS), which eliminates security holes and performance degradation. This hardened OS makes PIX firewalls easier to deploy and less costly to manage than software-based firewalls.
PIX Firewall VPN Accelerator Card
The Cisco Secure PIX Firewall VPN Accelerator Card (VAC) is a hardware-based IPsec accelerator that improves virtual private network performance. The VAC provides customers with platform scalability and security while working seamlessly with services necessary for successful VPN deployments, such as encryption, tunnelling and firewalling. The VAC also handles a variety of other IPsec-related tasks, including hashing, key exchange and storage of security associations, freeing the PIX main processor and memory of most IPsec tasks to ensure continued high performance for other perimeter security functions, such as access control and intrusion detection
Cisco router enhancements
The Cisco 7140 VPN routers and Cisco 7200 series routers now support two VPN Services Accelerator cards, increasing aggregate encryption throughput to 140Mbps while supporting up to 3,000 concurrent connections. The ability to implement multiple VACs is an integral part of the secure connectivity module of the Cisco SAFE blueprint. The Cisco 7200 series multi-service router is designed for hybrid private and VPN environments where multiple concurrent services such as high-density WAN aggregation, data centre connectivity and security are required. It provides the performance, port density and security services necessary for multi-use environments.
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