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FortiGate Multi-function Appliances

FortiGate appliances, multi-function security appliances, have many different variations, catering to the needs of client comapnies. From the FortiGate 50A, targeted primarily to telecommuters, to the FortiGate 5000 chassis, appropriate for service providers or large enterprises, each FortiGate appliance comes full of the vendor`s FortiOS operating system and content processing chip. The appliance is installed at the edge of the network and therefore provides security protection to the network from harmful traffic through the gateway. Multiple types of traffic are scanned and examined, including E-mail (POP3, SMTP, IMAP), Web (HTTP), and FTP.

The FortiGate 5000 series, in particular, are chassis that are available supporting 2, 5, or 14 total blades. Individual blade addditions consist of the 5001, which provides the security functions described above, and/or the 5003, which provides high-availability clustering options. The FortiGate 5000 chassis are AdvancedTCA compliant, consisting of hot-swappable blades, power supplies, fans, etc. Each security blade provides 3 Gbps of Firewall throughput, and supports up to 250 virtual domains.

Specific functions provided by the vendor include anti-virus scanning, stateful inspection firewalling, Web content filtering based on URL and/or keyword and phrase-based blocking, VPN support (PPTP, L2TP, IPSec VPN), including a VPN client from the vendor enabling VPN connectivity to the device from a remote location, and intrusion detection/prevention of over 1,300 type of attacks, including DoS and DDoS. The appliance data itself (attack patterns, signatures, etc.) is automatically maintained and updated via continuous updates from the vendor`s FortiProtect Network. An additional option for the FortiGate (and also the FortiMail offerings) is the vendor`s managed FortiGuard Antispam service, which utilizes the `dual pass` scanning technology in the appliances to check messages against known spammer IP addresses and E-mail content with Universal Resource Identifier (URI) scanning. URI scanning looks into each E-mail message to scan for known spam content such as spam URL links.