Fortinet Inc. continues to upgrade its 3000-series of unified threat management appliances for enterprises and service providers, most recently by adding a model with ten 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports.
The company also said it has updated the FortiOS 4.0 operating system to version MR3 with improved capabilities, as well as a new wireless access point.
The FortiGate 3140B becomes the number two in the series lineup (behind the 3950/3951B) offering up to 58 Gpbs of firewall performance and up to 22 Gpbs of VPN throughput. That’s up from the 40 Gbps firewall throughput of the 3040B introduced earlier this year.
The company did it by adding a second ASIC chip, said Patrick Bedwell, Fortinet’s vice-president of product marketing.
“It’s an expansion of our overall consolidated security message that we offer a broad range of technologies in a single device that customers can chose to deploy depending on their requirements,” he said.
All 3000-series units include firewall, VPN, intrusion protection, application control, WAN optimization, SSL inspection and data loss prevention among their capabilities.
The 2U-sized 3140B, which has a base price of US$49,995, has the highest 10 Gb port density in its class, the company says. It all it has 22 ports, which Fortinet says lets it be deployed either as a firewall or a unified threat management solution.
As for the FortiOS operating system, the upcoming MR3 version adds a number of new features for FortiGate appliances:
–Active profiling, which Bedwell is a network analysis capability that creates a baseline of normal user behaviour to set baselines against for groups or individuals. Depending on the profile, the FortiGate can be set to send an alert to a network administrator about unusual behaviour, or ordered to block or quarantine certain data. It can even throttle back particular traffic – say, from Facebook – if company policies allow access to a site but the traffic starts to build up;
–The FortiGate’s wireless controller capabilities have been extended to allow role-based access control to limit access to specified data. Rogue access point detection has also been improved.
Among the access points that can take advantage of the new capabilities is Fortinet’s new FortiAP 222B, a dual-radio outdoor unit;
–The operating system already had Flow-based inspection for viruses. MR3 adds Web filtering, traffic shaping and data loss prevention capabilities to bring it in line with the proxy-based inspection;
–Two-factor authentication via the new FortiToken one-time password gives administrators finer IPSec and SSL VPN approval as well as control over logins.
FortiOS MR3 will be available this quarter.
