Fortinet completes firewall line with management system

On the heels of its 10,000th shipment of hardware-based anti-virus firewall systems last week, Santa Clara, CA-based Fortinet announced the launch of its FortiManager System, a management and monitoring tool that will help it serve large enterprises as well as position the company’s network-based firewall solutions with service providers as a managed security solutions option.

FortiManager automates the deployment of and provides centralized management for all Fortinet’s premise-based, enterprise and carrier-class ASIC-powered (application specific integrated circuit) antivirus firewall systems. The FortiGate 50,100, 200 and 300 systems serve SOHOs, small- to medium-sized businesses and telecommuters. The FortiGate 400 and 500 series products provide real-time antivirus, firewall, VPN, network intrusion detection and traffic-shaping services at up 280 Mbps for enterprise applications. The company’s high-end products, the Fortigate 3000 and 3600 were introduced this year. The 3000 has three, one Gpbs ports and can screen 2.25 Gbps of throughput. The 3600 model has 6 ports and can handle up to four Gbps.

“At a list price of $30K for shipments in North America, that is extremely competitive just as a network security device,” said Richard Kagan, vice president of marketing at Fortinet. “But when you add the fact that it does content security in real-time, that makes it a distinguishing product.”

Fortinet claims it is the only company currently providing ASIC acceleration for content-level security, such as audio and video, content filtering and network-level security. It uses smart ASICs that are designed and developed internally.

The company has sold its carrier-class antivurus firewall system to PSINet in France. The introduction of the FortiManager System was key to the provider rolling out managed security services.

“We’ve grown our business the hard way. We have sold a lot of units, without the benefit of a centralized management tool,” Kagan said. “But we have broken through that and we expect that this will have an accelerating effect for us. It absolutely cracks the code for profitable managed services.”

The first release of FortiManager supports centralized configuration and element management for all the security functions on all the FortiGate products. It also supports device level policy creation, management and synchronization and can be used to upgrade device firmware remotely and monitor traffic and alerts and filter logs.

The tiered architecture of FortiManager includes a Java-based administration console with a CORBA application interface to the FortiManager server. The server handles the management functionality and communicates with the firewall units. The biggest differentiator for the FortiGate systems are their ability to provide the antivurus firewall security for content at up to 4 Gbps.