Yes those (IMHO) are dedicated Intrusion Detection or Prevention devices Lonkero and not simply a firewall.

Hardware as mentioned by Arend simply means that it is a dedicated device and not software driven from an installation of some type of software to handle firewall/threat detection.

A dedicated hardware device can typically handle a much higher load of data traffic than a server that is also performing other functions.

However - again I'm not a Cisco expert but I'm reasonably sure that they offer all those exact same things you're talking about.

I do use a dedicated SPAM filtering Barracuda device for inbound/outbound email.