Re: is the ASA a true hardware solution?

the pix/asa firewalls have been stanard PC chips/motherboards for many 
years. the only place you see ASICs is on the very high end devices, and 
there it's on the network interfaces.

however, as far as management is concerned, this is a 'hardware' firewall, 
not a software firewall because it is not running a commodity OS, the fact 
that it's still running an OS, just a priorietary one slipps past them)


  On Thu, 5 May 2011, Greg Whynott 
wrote:

> in the context of the never ending debates related to software/hardware firewalls...
>
>
> i was looking inside of our newest 5580,   it appears to be a standard HP server box (DL585)  with a hardware encryption accelerator option card inserted into a pci slot.  everything else appears to be verbatim to what you would receive from HP if you ordered their high end x86 server box.
>
> should one not have any sort of encryption needs,  would this box considered a software firewall?    I couldn't find one custom asic,  module  or other chip with a cisco brand stamp on it,  beyond the flash.
>
>
> thanks!
>
> -g
>
>
>
> --
>
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