Fortinet announced the introduction of a powerful multi-threat security appliance that meets the performance and deployment flexibility demands for small-to-medium sized businesses and branch offices of large enterprises and delivers significant headroom for growth. The new FortiGate-100D integrates a broad range of attack recognition and prevention technologies into a single platform to help smaller networks successfully protect users, data, and systems against targeted attacks aimed at penetrating networks and stealing valuable information.

The introduction of the FortiGate-100D coincides with a number of market dynamics calling for high performance network security. First, network bandwidth requirements are soaring due to increasing business use of data-intensive social media applications that frequently embed rich video content. Second, users are deploying multiple mobile devices including smart phones and tablets to access these applications that are becoming fundamental to conducting business. These mobile devices send data in much smaller packets, which drives the need for a firewall that's capable of higher connections per second. And third, many of today's most sophisticated threats emanate from the application layer, which requires the ability to detect and thwart attacks embedded in thousands of different applications. As a result, organizations face significant challenges to control and manage their fast-changing business infrastructure with advanced security solutions that can scale with ever-increasing performance requirements.

The new FortiGate-100D features significant capacity and performance improvements, as well as configuration options that facilitate network growth and the expansion of branch office deployments. By combining firewall, application control, IP Sec and SSL VPN, intrusion prevention, antivirus, antimalware, antispam, and Web filtering into a single device, the new appliance can help organizations meet regulatory compliance requirements and protect against the latest viruses, network vulnerabilities, worms, spam and phishing attacks.

In addition, the appliance provides substantial onboard storage to archive data for policy compliance, generate SQL-based reports locally, or enable WAN optimization. The WAN optimization feature, which is particularly important in light of the broad adoption of bandwidth-intensive applications that can slow performance between remote locations and a central office, increases network performance by reducing the amount of communication and data transmitted between applications and servers across a WAN.

Given the resource constraints in smaller organizations and branch offices, the FortiGate-100D is an attractive solution because it installs in minutes using the FortiExplorer configuration wizard and automatically downloads regular updates from Fortinet's FortiGuard Security Subscription Services, which helps ensure up-to-date protection against sophisticated threats without the need for administrator intervention.

Like other appliances in the FortiGate product family, the FortiGate-100D is equipped with the FortiOS operating system that leverages specialized FortiASIC hardware to deliver increased levels of security and performance.

Enhancements in FortiGate-100D

The new FortiGate-100D features improved remote access capabilities, higher volume connectivity, increased IPS performance and improved flow-based and proxy-based antivirus throughput.

As a high performance and high capacity security appliance, the FortiGate-100D delivers 2.5 Gbps of firewall throughput, 950 Mbps of IPS throughput and can support up to 2.5 million concurrent firewall sessions.

Because of the increasing mobility of today's workforce and the growing importance of branch office operations transferring sensitive data, the new appliance supports 5,000 Client-to-Gateway IPSec VPN tunnels. In addition, it supports up to 200 concurrent SSL VPN users.

To improve antivirus performance, the FortiGate-100D delivers 700 Mbps of flow-based throughput or 300 Mbps of proxy-based throughput. Each of these performance benchmarks represent an approximately 4.5 X improvement over the FortiGate-110C.

To facilitate deployment in a wide range of network architectures as well as support network growth, the port density is among the highest of any device in its price range. The FortiGate-100D is equipped with twenty-two GbE interfaces that can be easily partitioned into independent security zones and custom combinations of LAN and WAN ports, dual-WAN redundant connections for maximum reliability and availability are supported by default, and a dedicated DMZ port adds an extra layer of protection for Web-facing servers. Out-of-band management using FortiExplorer, which provides an easy way to setup and configure the device, is provided by a USB management port. Dedicated management and HA ports make the FortiGate-100D easy to manage and deploy in high availability configurations.

"The FortiGate-100D is a strategic product because it intersects the small-to-medium business and large enterprise branch office markets where we are seeing significant demand," said Michael Xie, chief technology officer with Fortinet. "These markets are looking for very high performance network security solutions that can grow in lockstep with their fast changing business requirements. At the same time, they're looking for a cost-effective and simple solution to deploy security that doesn't require high administrative overhead. We've listened closely to our customers and are delivering a new appliance that addresses these needs."