Fortinet Grows Application Delivery Portfolio

Network security specialist Fortinet has expanded its secure application delivery product portfolio, the FortiADC-300E Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and the FortiDirector hosted Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) service.

The additions are a result of the company’s recent acquisitions of Coyote Point Systems and XDN.

Application Delivery

The FortiADC-300E, aimed at mid-sized enterprises, combines traditional load balancing with features that route traffic at the application level and offload secure HTTPS transactions from servers.

FortiDirector, aimed at medium and large enterprises, application service providers (ASPs) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, bridges application traffic across multiple data centres and works with the FortiADC, FortiBalancer and Coyote Point Equalizer application delivery product lines.

Based on Coyote Point’s Equalizer E370LX application delivery appliance, FortiADC-300E extends the current FortiADC lineup into the midmarket and boasts up to 4.8G bps of L4 throughput and up to 75,000 L7 requests per second. Multiple high-availability failover options include Multi-Active N+M failover, which puts spare appliances to work instead of sitting idle while waiting for a failover to occur.

Other features include advanced L7 policy-based routing to give users granular control of traffic and IPv6 6-in-4 tunnelling, which is designed to help organisations manage the transition to IPv6 by translating IPv6 traffic at the ADC level and routing it to destinations on an IPv4 network. In addition, 7,500 HTTPS transactions per second helps offload secure application traffic from servers to increase application performance and improve end-user response times.

FortiDirector GSLB is a hosted service using XDN’s CloudDirector platform, and instead of requiring GSLB to be managed within a customer’s IT infrastructure, the service elevates it to a global Domain Name System (DNS)-based network that routes traffic anywhere in the world. The solution can also route traffic to single servers without requiring an ADC or a hosted server solution.

Market Demand

“To meet the rapid growth of secure applications, enterprises are demanding the integration of high performance security features into all aspects of their IT infrastructure, especially beginning at the front door with the application delivery controller,” John Maddison, vice president of marketing for Fortinet, said in a statement. “As a logical extension to Fortinet’s leadership in the high performance network security market, the FortiADC-300E and FortiDirector combine to offer blazing fast HTTP performance, high reliability and optimised support of secure traffic across multiple data centres.”

Other features of the FortiDirector GSLB include the ability to load balance any protocol through DNS-based GSLB to span any Web-based application across multiple data centres, route traffic based on closest servers to reduce latency or by time of day to take advantage of off-hour discounts with Internet service providers (ISPs) and API-based health checking routes traffic to best performing resources based on server and network health.

In July, the company announced an expansion to the FortiGate Unified Threat Management (UTM) product line that is designed for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), distributed enterprises, retail networks and branch/home offices.

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Originally published on eWeek.