I have listened to their seminar about this... As the simple L5 firewall it's not bad, through it realise the fixed set of ruls and defends your from the simple SMTP attacks only. But anyway, IOS FW is just what 90% of the customers need...
How would IOS FW perform on Cisco 7x00-class equipment with 100M-to-Gigabit traffic ?
Umm... Very poorly.
At the low end it's acceptable. Gigabit traffic sucks on 7500 series routers even without any kind of filtering. The 7000-series routers, if they have an SSE, will do standard and extended access lists in the switch engine. Now, given the limitations of CX-FEIP-2TX boards (the only faste boards that will work in a non-RSP 7000), you are lucky to get 70 mbit/sec through that. If you have fddi, you can get most of the way to 100 mbit/sec one way (the CX-FIP cards, which are the only FDDIs that work in a 7000, won't do full-duplex). The 7500-series routers, you really want to get a VIP2-50 rather than a 2-40 or lower if you're going to be doing filtering on the linecard. You can load the fast ethernets up just fine there. 400 mbit/sec seems to be the upper limit of the currently shipping generation of gigE cards for the 7500 series. Hope this helps (and standing by for corrections from the #cisco IRC mafia...) ---Rob