Cisco Systems: PIX Firewall 515E.

(From Network Computing Asian Edition)

Byline: Dario Forte

The Cisco PIX 515E firewall is intended for SME environments and provides up to 188Mbps of firewall throughput with the ability to handle as many as 125,000 simultaneous sessions. In a redundant configuration, the PIX 515E features stateful failover, and with an added VPN hardware accelerator, can support up to 2,000 IPsec tunnels. The PIX 515E provides a modular chassis with support for up to six 10/100 Fast Ethernet interfaces.

Occupying a one-unit-high rack module, the PIX 515E firewall appliance replaces the previous PIX 515 model. The simplicity of setup and management of the PIX 515E has been further improved in the recently updated Pix Device Manager (PDM) software, which is Java-based and provides an effective cross-platform tool for interacting with the various PIX devices on the network via a browser?especially if one is not familiar with Cisco?s text-based IOS interface.

There are clear instructions in the PDM documentation that are easy to follow and should get you up and running in a matter of minutes. An important feature is that you can download an updated PDM directly from the Cisco site and upload it onto the PIX via a console connection. Subsequently, all that is needed to manage the box is a Java-based browser that connects to the PIX via https protocol.

I tested the PIX 515E with version 6.2 of the PIX OS, which includes a series of improvements and added functions including support for auto-update of software setup and images, and a bidirectional NAT function, which allows you to transfer external addresses to addresses consistent with the subnet used in LAN. SNMP support has also improved; the appliance can be viewed and controlled by management software such as IBM/Tivoli and HP OpenView. For example, there is a trap for viewing the CPU load in real ...