Today's businesses operate less on local/country or even regional levels, and more on a global level. With greater and more ubiquitous connectivity also comes greater opportunity for enterprises to discover new ways to connect and collaborate. New tools such as video telephony, web collaboration, e-communities, information sharing, and the like are growing in maturity and value. At the heart of these communications and collaboration models is the network, which serves as the primary conduit of business interactions and services among various sites, evolving at a greater speed. As the network evolves and grows, security technologies should evolve to transparently protect the data and various applications in the network.

The Cisco VPN Services Port Adapter (VSPA) is the next-generation VPN module designed to support next-generation VPN technologies with system bandwidths of 8 Gbps in a modular, flexible, and scalable form factor. The Cisco VSPA requires the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Services SPA Carrier-600 (SSC-600) to operate in the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches. Each SSC-600 module takes up one slot in a Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switch and can support up to two Cisco VPN Services Port Adapters. The Cisco VSPA, accompanied with the SSC-600, delivers scalable and cost-effective VPN performance for Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switches.