The Cisco Secure PIX Firewall series delivers strong security in an easy-to-install, integrated hardware/software appliance that offers outstanding performance. The series allows you to rigorously protect your internal network from the outside world-providing full firewall security protection. Unlike typical CPU-intensive full-time proxy servers that perform extensive processing on each data packet at the application level, Cisco Secure PIX Firewalls use a non-UNIX, secure, real-time, embedded system. The Cisco Secure PIX Firewalls deliver superior performance of up to 250,000 simultaneous connections, over 6,500 connections per second, and nearly 170 megabits per second (Mbps) throughput. This level of performance is dramatically greater than that delivered by other appliance-like firewalls or those based on general-purpose operating systems.

With market-leading performance, the Cisco Secure PIX Firewall creates little to no network performance impact. The product enforces secure access between an internal network and Internet, extranet, or intranet links completely concealing the architecture of an internal network from the outside world. In addition, Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections using the IPSec standards can be made with the Cisco Secure PIX Firewall.