Fortinet Offers FortiGate Security Appliance

Fortinet releases a security appliance and switching platforms aimed at cost-conscious businesses.

Unified threat management solutions company Fortinet announced the release of FortiGate multithreat security appliance that rounds out its small and midsize business family of products with an entry-level edition in the FortiGate-200B. The FortiGate-200B appliance offers a 5 Gigabytes per second (Gbps) firewall and 2.5 Gbps IPSec VPN throughputs. Fortinet is positioning the FortiGate-200B as an entry-level product within the mid-enterprise segment, well-suited for deployment in remote and branch office locations.

The network security appliance also delivers high port density with 16 ports, all of which are accelerated with FortiASIC processors. The company said the FortiGate-200B appliance is expected to be generally available in December and will ship with the newest version of Fortinet's operating system, FortiOS 4.0 MR1. The FortiGate-200B is joined by the -310B, -620B and recently announced -1240B products, all aimed at midmarket companies.

"Our mid-enterprise product family is intended to deliver the best possible security performance and functionality at every price point, even at the entry-level segment supported by the FortiGate-200B," said Anthony James, vice president of products, Fortinet. "In the highly competitive mid-enterprise segment, we believe we have delivered four very competitive, high-value products to meet the diverse and demanding requirements of this customer segment."

The Fortinet Storage Module (FSM) bay gives businesses the option of adding disk-based storage for local logging and content archiving for policy compliance. Alternately, companies can use the FSM to enable WAN optimization to help lower WAN costs and improve network performance. In addition, FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer centralized management and reporting appliances help simplify the deployment, monitoring and maintenance of the security infrastructure. The appliances firewall capability boasts inspection of up to 500,000 concurrent sessions.

Earlier this year, the company launched the FortiSwitch family with the debut of two10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE), low latency switching platforms featuring high port density and "lossless" scalability. The company said the FortiSwitch-1000 chassis and FortiSwitch-500 platform are designed to build high-performance network fabrics such as those required by supercomputers for calculation-intensive tasks or high-speed interconnect applications for server virtualization, data center consolidation, and parallel and cloud-based computing. This FortiSwitch product set was added to Fortinet's product line as a result of Fortinet's purchase of certain assets from Woven Systems earlier this year.

James said the high-port density and high-speed switching capabilities of the new FortiSwitch platforms underscore the performance- and value-centric philosophy of Fortinet's entire product portfolio. "These combined benefits - the industry-standard Ethernet interface, Fortinet's vScale switching technology, and value-focused product line - will enable customers to more easily build a high-performance network fabric at industry-leading price points," he said.