SUNNYVALE, Calif. - Sept. 8, 2008 - Fortinet^® - the pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions - today announced expanded 10-gigabit Ethernet (GbE) support for its FortiGate-5000 series product line, which allows large enterprise, carrier and service provider customers to deploy superior multi-threat security within the fastest and, often, the most mission-critical portions of their network environment. Three new products being announced today contribute to Fortinet's ultra-high performance, chassis-based product line, and extend 10-GbE on a per-blade basis as well as for blade-to-blade communications.

At the heart of Fortinet's modular 10-GbE product suite is its FortiGate®-5001A multi-threat security blade, which offers the highest levels of availability, redundancy and scalability. Now, with 10-GbE interface options, performance with content protection is increased as part of the FortiGate modular system. Complementing the FortiGate-5001A blades are the following new 10-GbE products, which together enable up to 182 Gbps of firewall performance:

• FortiSwitch-5003A hub blade allows 10-Gbps inter-blade communications within the FortiGate-5000 Series chassis to load-distribute incoming traffic across multiple security blades;
• RTM-XB2 (Rear Transition Module) is a new component of the FortiGate-5000 Series that acts as the channel for 10-GbE communications between the FortiGate and FortiSwitch blades.

A growing number of carriers, service providers and large enterprises are migrating to 10-GbE networks to satisfy the increasing demand for bandwidth within the datacenter and core. Enterprise customers are requiring faster network speeds to support bandwidth-intensive applications like rich media voice/video applications for real-time communication. In addition, the 10-GbE adoption trend is being fueled by decreasing per-port price. As a result, network managers around the globe are requiring 10-GbE security for their 10-GbE networks. A telecommunications carrier, for example, might use the FortiGate-5000 Series suite of 10-GbE products to provide multi-gigabit full content inspection at their data center locations, where 10-GbE is commonly deployed. Prior to Fortinet's new 10-GbE offerings, companies were deploying multi-threat security solutions at gigabit speeds or below, or choosing to implement something less than full content security on 10-GbE networks.

All FortiGate-5000 Series systems combine Fortinet's hardware and software offerings to provide one or all of a broad array of security applications - firewall, antivirus, intrusion prevention, VPN, spyware prevention and antispam. When deployed as a consolidated solution, FortiGate systems bring together a broad multi-threat network security platform.

"What Fortinet announced today is a complete 10-Gb Ethernet strategy for multi-threat security, which is an increasing requirement for our large enterprise and service provider customers," said Michael Xie, CTO and founder, Fortinet. "We accelerated all the elements required to fully enable 10-GbE performance within a chassis-based system so that there are no bottlenecks at any point in the security infrastructure."

The FortiGate-5000 family consists of three chassis models - the two-slot FortiGate-5020, five-slot FortiGate-5050, and 14-slot FortiGate-5140 - each of which can be populated with FortiGate-5001A blades that provide security functions and/or FortiSwitch-5003A blades that provide high availability clustering functions. All FortiGate-5000 Series chassis and blades comply with the AdvancedTCA industry standard, a series of specifications for the next generation of carrier grade communications equipment. These specifications incorporate the latest trends in high speed interconnect technologies, next generation processors, and improved reliability, manageability and serviceability, resulting in a new blade and chassis form factor optimized for communications.

Additional Product Detail

• FortiGate-5001A - in addition to 10-GbE performance, a new feature on this security blade is support for single- and dual-width advanced mezzanine card (AMC) expansion slots for increased modularity with additional ports or local storage;
• FortiSwith-5003A - provides eight 10-GbE ports on the front of the device, as well as 10-GbE and gigabit Ethernet support on the backplane of the chassis;
• RTM-XB2 - provides FortiASIC hardware acceleration to traffic traversing the 10-GbE backplane channel.

All three products will be available and shipping in September 2008. Additional product information can be found at http://fortinet.com/products/.