Fortinet Inc.’s best known products are its universal threat management appliances, but it also makes a messaging gateway.
Today the company torqued the OS for the FortiMail appliances by taking a key capability from the FortiGate UTM line, as well as adding two new hardware devices.
The added capabilities to Version 5.0 of the software should appeal to managed security service providers, Carl Windsor, Fortinet’s director of product management, said in an interview, while one of the new gateways will appeal to large enterprises.
Now added to the FortiMail operating system is the FortiGuard Web filtering and content protection offered from the security gateways.
With FortiGuard administrators can filter URLs within email as well as Web sites users can connect to.
The previous version of the operating system was able to be partitioned so it can operate in a multi-tenant environment. Version 5.0 allows service providers to delegate certain administration tasks to customers using the messaging security service, such as the creation of new accounts up to a limit and to use disk space up to a set maximum, without the provider’s permission. This eases the workload on the provider.
In addition, the new OS lets providers provision new accounts quicker by integrating with the MMSP’s directory through LDAP for provisioning domains or individuals.
FortiMail can not only be a gateway, it can also be run as a full mail server. For MMSPs running in that mode, the new operating system lets them offer customers groupware services such as calendaring and shared address books.
“Now we’re not just an email security solution,” said Windsor.
A 2U-sized appliance that has a list price of US$32,995, it comes with two 2 TB hard drives (versus the C which came with two 1TB drives). The 3000D can include up to sixe hard drives, compared to four in the previous model.
Up to 25 of the units can be stacked via a high availability option that can be configured to active-passive mode that synchronizes all messages and data, or in configuration-only mode that syncs only critical information.
For small and medium businesses or remote offices there’s the FortiMail 200D, a new entry-level model. In mail server mode supports up to 200 users, more in gateway mode, and can scans up to 170,000 emails an hour.
The appliance, which has a list price of US$3,498, includes identity-based encryption at no cost for sending secure email to a third party without extra software.