The FortiGate appliances are multi-function security appliances served in several flavors, from the FortiGate 50A, targeted primarily to telecommuters; to the FortiGate 5000 chassis for service providers or large enterprises. Each FortiGate appliance is loaded with the vendor's FortiOS operating system and is hardware accelerated via their proprietary FortiASIC content processing chip.

The appliance is installed at the edge of the network and therefore provides security protection to the network from harmful traffic through the gateway. Multiple types of traffic are scanned and examined, including E-mail (POP3, SMTP, IMAP), Web (HTTP), and FTP.

Specific functions provided by the vendor include anti-virus scanning; stateful inspection firewalling; Web content filtering based on URL and/or keyword and phrase-based blocking; VPN support (PPTP, L2TP, IPSec VPN), including a VPN client from the vendor enabling VPN connectivity to the device from a remote location; and intrusion detection/prevention of over 1300 type of attacks, including DoS and DDoS. The appliance data itself (attack patterns, signatures, etc.) is automatically maintained and updated via continuous updates from the vendor's FortiProtect Network. An additional option for the FortiGate (and also the FortiMail offerings) is the vendor's managed FortiGuard Antispam service, which utilizes the "dual pass" scanning technology in the appliances to check messages against known spammer IP addresses and E-mail content with Universal Resource Identifier (URI) scanning. URI scanning looks into each E-mail message to scan for known spam content such as spam URL links.

The FortiGate 5000 series, in particular, are chassis that are available supporting 2, 5, or 14 total blades. Individual blade addditions consist of the 5001, which provides the security functions described above; and/or the 5003, which provides high-availability clustering options. The FortiGate 5000 chassis are AdvancedTCA compliant, consisting of hot-swappable blades, power supplies, fans, etc. Each security blade provides 3 Gbps of Firewall throughput, and supports up to 250 virtual domains.

Other product offerings from the vendor typically complement or extend the FortiGate appliances, including FortiManager (for the centralized management of large numbers of FortiGate Antivirus Firewalls), FortiAnalyzer/FortiReporter for aggregated analysis and reporting, FortiClient for remote host protection, FortiWiFi for WLAN security, and the FortiMail line of appliances for secure E-mail messaging (antivirus, and also supports the aforementioned antispam service).

The latest additions to the FortiGate line are the FortiGate-1000A and FortiGate-1000AFA2. The units boast 10 10/100/1000 BaseT ports; clustering support, and dual, hot swappable power supplies and fans; and, in the AFA2 model, an additional pair of SFP ports that are specifically tuned via the vendor's "FortiAccel" technology to accelerate small packet performance expecially for voice, video, or other streaming media applications.

The FortiGate appliances are available now. Visit the Vendor's Web site for further information.

product submission by EITPlanet Staff

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