The Fortigate-60 is well specified with a four-port 10/100Mbits/sec Lan switch and three Wan ports, also rated at 10/100Mbits/sec. One of the Wan ports can be used to configure a DMZ (demilitarised zone), the other two adding redundancy to the Internet link. The Fortigate-60 can be installed as either an Internet gateway, with optional Network Address Translation (Nat), or configured to plug into the Lan to monitor traffic in transparent mode.

The appliance is Asic-based (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit), running custom FortiOS software. Setup and management are via a browser with an optional command-line interface (CLI). A setup wizard makes deployment easy, but no other wizards are provided to help with more detailed setup. The menu-based browser interface is easy to follow, reasonably intuitive and designed to prevent conflict and other common mistakes.

An ICSA-certified stateful inspection firewall is rules-driven and has bandwidth management facilities. Next is a VPN server (only available when the Fortigate-60 is configured as a gateway) which supports PPTP, L2TP and IPSec tunnelling.

The anti-virus scanner is maintained by Fortinet, with regular updates pushed out to the appliance automatically and this can scan HTTP, FTP and all email traffic. There's anti-spam support as part of the extensive content-filtering options for both web and email users. URL and keyword driven, these can take a while to configure, but a content-filtering service from Cerberian can help automate this (www.cerberian.com).

An intrusion-detection option scans for common signatures and, with the firewall, can prevent a range of common Denial of Service (DoS) and other attacks. Useful logging and alerting facilities are built in and an optional management tool (Fortimanager) can centrally administer this and other Fortinet appliances.

Contact: Fortinet 01483 549 061
www.fortinet.com