Starting today, FortiNet is shipping FortiManager System, a hardware unit that manages up to 5,000 FortiGate Antivirus Firewalls, hardware-based systems the company sells to service providers. The company says PSINET Europe, the first firm to deploy FortiManager, plans to use the unit to manage its existing stable of FortiGates that used to require individual support.

Founded by Ken Xie of NetScreen fame, FortiNet aims to replicate Xie's success in centralizing firewall management by doing the same to more advanced services like virus scanning. From the service provider's perspective, this is an ideal solution for a large-scale deployment of managed services. An individual FortiGate comes with as many as four Gigabit ports, firewall support, a VPN, a network IDS, an anti-virus suite and content filtering appliances. Now that up to 5,000 of these units can be managed from a single console, a function previously reverse-engineered with specialized software, a Web host with limited managed services experience can venture into this business and make money.

"The base product in North America is $12,000, for FortiManager server plus the console software which can manage up to 25 devices - of any size - so you could be managing three-quarters of a million dollars worth of devices for that amount," said Rick Kagan, vice president of marketing at FortiNet.

FortiNet just shipped its ten thousandth FortiGate unit in March, with most of the customers being in Asia Pacific and Europe where the company started developing its sales. Besides all-in-one functionality, the big advantage of FortiGate is in hardware acceleration of managed services it supports. All units deploy a FortiASIC content processor, which gives a much-needed boost to applications that could use hardware-based processing power, like network-based anti-virus.