Increasing Performance by Leveraging the Supervisor

One of the most significant features to be released with the 4.x code train is the capability to offload flows to the supervisor, called Trusted Flow Acceleration. This capability dramatically increases the throughput of predefined types of traffic and requires a minimum code of 12.2(33)SXI on the supervisor.

Prior to Trusted Flow Acceleration, all traffic was required to flow through the FWSM; refer to Chapter 2, “Overview of the Firewall Services Module,” for details. With the addition of Trusted Flow Acceleration, particular types of traffic defined by an access list can now bypass the FWSM entirely.