🛡️ Cisco ASA 5516-X vs Firepower 1010 vs Firepower 1120

The headline issue is lifecycle, not throughput. The ASA 5500-X family is past end-of-sale and approaching the tail of software maintenance — buying or extending one in 2025 is a stopgap, not a strategic decision. The Firepower 1010 and 1120 are the direct refresh path Cisco itself recommends, and they run either the classic ASA image or the modern FTD (Firepower Threat Defence) image, so existing ASA configurations can be migrated with the ASA-to-FTD converter or simply re-deployed in ASA mode.

The Firepower 1010 is a fanless desktop unit aimed squarely at small branches, retail sites and home-worker setups for senior staff. Its two PoE+ ports are genuinely useful for powering a wireless access point or IP phone without a separate switch, and 890 Mbps of FTD throughput comfortably covers a typical UK FTTP or leased-line tail-circuit. The trade-offs are real though: only 75 VPN peers, 100K sessions and no SFP cages mean it runs out of headroom quickly once you start doing site-to-site VPN aggregation or SSL inspection at scale.

The Firepower 1120 is the more serious box. At 2.3 Gbps FTD, 2.6 Gbps NGIPS and 850 Mbps of TLS inspection it has roughly 2.5× the inspected throughput of the 1010, doubles concurrent sessions to 200K, and adds four SFP ports for fibre uplinks or DMZ segregation. For a UK small-enterprise HQ, a professional-services firm with 100–250 users, or a regional NHS or local-authority site doing meaningful SSL decryption for ICO/NCSC-aligned inspection, the 1120 is the sensible floor.

Recommendation framework: if you still own a 5516-X and it is working, plan the refresh now rather than renewing SmartNet on dying hardware. Choose the 1010 for branches and small offices where silence, PoE and sub-gigabit WAN are the reality. Step up to the 1120 wherever you need fibre uplinks, TLS inspection, more than ~75 VPN tunnels, or any prospect of growth — the price delta is modest compared with the operational pain of outgrowing a 1010 inside the refresh cycle.

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