Santa Clara, Ca.-based Fortinet claims its FortiManager System software allows service providers to provide more services to small business customers at lower cost.

by ISP-Planet Staff [April 7, 2003]

Tomorrow, Santa Clara, Ca.-based Fortinet, will announce the release of its FortiManager System software, which can be used to deliver a full suite of security and infrastructure services from the company's appliances.

Services the products appliances can deliver include:

• Firewall—a stateful inspection firewall certified by ICSA labs.
• VPN—supports PPTP, LT2P, and IPSec. The product's anti-virus software scans encrypted messages for viruses and worms.
• IDS—uses a customizable database of over 1,300 attack signatures
• Anti-virus—The only ASIC-based anti-virus product certified by ICSA labs.
• Content Filtering—uses keywords and phrases to block objectionable content

Centralizing management simplifies tasks. Richard Kagan, Fortinet vice president of marketing, says, "our centralized logging makes correlation easier. If you have different devices, you risk having different time stamps, for example, which is a problem when you're trying to figure out the sequence of events during security forensics."

Kagan says that compliance to standards enables service providers to work with their existing infrastructure, retaining OSS/BSS systems, such as billing. The software uses a third party ODBC-based database, and the software's GUI uses CORBA.

The company is especially proud of its ASIC-based content filtering and anti-virus services. As this is the only such solution certified by ICSA labs, it should be more efficient than any other certified solution.

Fortinet products can be accessed remotely with the Fortinet Remote VPN Client.

The company's key sales pitch concerns allowing service providers to make more money from the provision of security services to customers. Kagan notes that if each security service is on a different platform, with its own unique GUI, its own logging database, and its own license agreement, the costs of purchase and ownership are much higher than the costs are with Fortinet, with all products on one platform.

Fortinet has taken great care to provide an intuitive, easy to use GUI. Logging of events is in real time, making monitoring equally easy. In this environment, ease of use should translate directly into lower ownership costs by improving the efficiency of network administrators.

Kagan says his company's products compare favorably with the conventional approach, where CPE provides intrusion detection, VPN, and firewall. By adding anti-virus and content filtering, and by reducing costs, Fortinet expects to allow service providers to reduce costs and to charge more for additional services.

Pricing and availability
The FortiManager System will be available in North America tomorrow. The company sells its products around the world. The prices we obtained are for the North American market.

The FortiManager System will be priced starting at $12,000 for management of 25 units, with decreasing per-unit prices for volume orders.

Fortinet CPE is on the market in North America in a wide variety of configurations ranging from a SOHO box at 30 Mbps of firewall throughput, the Fortigate 50, for $695 to a top of the line product with 4 Gbps of firewall throughput , the Fortigate 3600, for $29,995. A midrange product, such as the FortiGate 100, with 95 Mbps of firewall throughput retails for $2,000.

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