Fortinet Announces Breakthrough In IPv6 Security Throughput

PRESS RELEASE

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec. 29, 2009 - Fortinet' (NASDAQ: FTNT) " a leading network security provider and worldwide leader of unified threat management (UTM) solutions " today announced it has achieved ground-breaking IPv6 performance on its FortiGate'-5140 multi-threat chassis-based system, which delivers 56 Gbps IPv6 throughput, setting a new industry benchmark for network security processing. This leadership IPv6 performance was benchmarked and validated using a BreakingPoint Elite resiliency testing chassis with multiple 10 GbE interfaces.

Continued concern over the eventual exhaustion of publicly available IPv4 addresses is causing many organizations to more seriously plan their move to the IPv6 standard in the near term. This, coupled with rising international adoption requirements from countries like Japan along with the U.S. federal mandate requiring agencies to adopt technologies that support IPv6, makes it clear that vendors will need to make headway into not only supporting IPv6 but also breaking barriers that have hindered adoption to date. Thus, enabling high performance at multi-Gigabit Ethernet rates will remove many of the key impediments related to the adoption of IPv6. Today, Fortinet has successfully demonstrated performance of 56 Gbps for IPv6 throughput based on its proprietary FortiASIC technologies that accelerate security processing of the FortiGate-5000 Series blades and additional ADM modules. The FortiASIC processors are specialized security processors that accelerate the processing of network traffic focusing on security enforcement including firewall policies and additional content inspection requirements.

"While IPv6 has been in discussion for many years, its adoption is now in the foreseeable future, so the performance requirements to support this new standard are more important than ever," said Michael Xie, founder and CTO, Fortinet. "Our dedicated-ASIC approach to accelerate security performance continues to hold strong in delivering the processing speeds that are required to seamlessly bring IPv6 online.

Validated With Most Current and Comprehensive IPv6 Testing Platform, Live Attacks and Evasions

Validation of the FortiGate-5000 Series IPv6 performance was done through IPv6 testing performed using BreakingPoint Elite enables organizations to have additional confidence in adopting the new Internet protocol. Testing with the BreakingPoint Elite provided the most current IPv6 standards as well as support for both application and security traffic. This enabled simulation of true global network traffic, with blended stateful application traffic, live security attacks at line-rate speeds and high session counts, delivered from the same address space.

Fortinet's FortiOS 4.0 firmware already provides support for the IPv6 standard. The FortiOS 3.0 firmware has also successfully fulfilled all requirements for IPv6 Phase-2 Core Support as a router product. This certification, awarded by the IPv6 Ready Logo Program, demonstrates that Fortinet has developed the critical base support for IPv6 that will allow the company to meet the growing demands of government agencies and enterprises that require IPv6-capable UTM multi-threat security appliances.