Fortinet goes virtual

Fortinet is introducing virtual versions of four of its physical appliances that are designed to protect traffic as it moves between virtual machines.

FortiGate, FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer and FortiMail appliances will be compatible with VMware virtual environments, the company says, extending security as well as management and reporting to the traffic traveling among VMs.

FortiGate is the company's unified threat management (UTM) appliance that performs a range of security functions including firewall, VPN and intrusion detection. FortiGate software will be deployable on VMware VMs. It will be licensed for two, four and eight virtual CPUs.

One feature of FortiGate physical appliances is virtual domains, the ability to create separate firewall and administrative domains within one appliance. Virtual domains are supported within virtual FortiGate instances, the company says.

FortiManager is the management platform for Fortinet appliances, FortiAnalyzer is the analysis and reporting tool, and FortiMail is the e-mail security scanner.

In each case the functionality will be the same as for the appliances. Because instances of the products run on VMs within physical machines, they can filter and report on traffic among the guests on the host machines, Fortinet says.

Other vendors offer security software for deployment on VMs including Catbird, Reflex Systems, Check Point, Altor, Stonesoft, Vyatta and others. Cisco is expected to announce virtual security platforms soon.

FortiGate Virtual Appliance starts at $9,995 for a two CPU version, $14,995 for the four CPU version and $29,995 for the eight CPU verstion. FortiManager Virtual Appliance, with a license of 5,000 devices/120,000 FortiClient agents, costs $22,495. FortiAnalyzer Virtual Appliance will become available in Q4, and FortiMail Virtual Appliance is due in Q1 2011. Pricing for them has not been set.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.

Source : Network World

Firewall Configuration

A firewall is a device or a set of devices, which can be implemented in any of the hardware, software or both. All the messages passing through the firewall are verified to meet some level of security criteria.

It acts as a computer security barrier, which analyzes all the incoming and outgoing traffic to and from your computer or network based on the firewall settings. There are some common types of firewalls like: Application level gateway, Packet filtering firewall, Circuit gateways and Hybrid firewall.

Application level gateway firewall works on the application layer of the protocol stack. It works more intelligently than the packet filtering firewall. Packet filtering firewall examines the information contained in the header of the message packets.

There are some factors based on which the filters can be added or removed from the firewall:

1. IP address

2. Ports

3. Protocols

IP address: Every computer connected to Internet has a unique IP address. The firewall configuration can be customized to block any IP address so that your computer will not allow any kind of communication to take in between.

Ports: The firewall can be configured to allow or block messages from any port number.

Protocols: There are some commonly used protocols like IP, HTTP, TCP, FTP, and SMTP etc., which can be included in the firewall filter.

Some operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows offer built-in firewalls that are turned on by default to block all the incoming threats from Internet. There are several other third party firewalls available. You can choose any one the firewall to replace the default firewall in Windows.