Leading high-performance network security provider, Fortinet, has announced that its FortiGate-5140B has handled 526 GB of blended application traffic and security attacks during recent massive-scale testing.

These definitive real-world tests were created using the Breaking Point Fire Storm CTM, the industry’s only product capable of creating state full application traffic at the massive-scale required to stress today’s high-performance firewalls.

During the tests, it pushed 526 GB of real-world traffic from applications such like Facebook, Pandora radio and AOL Instant Messenger, a statement from the company said.

The FortiGate performed at speeds that were three times faster than any competitor’s published results and maxed out at 559 GB of UDP traffic.

The FortiGate-5140B can inspect 10,000 downloaded iTunes songs every second or 36 million songs per hour, or it can inspect 228,000 average size web pages every second or 821 million pages per hour, the statement said.

“In a world filled with applications and escalating threats, IT buyers must evaluate firewalls by looking at the effects of the actual applications seen in the network such as email, instant messaging, databases and social networking,” said Dennis Cox, Breaking Point CTO and co-founder.

“Firewall testing that simply looks at throughput, as many do, is faulty, and standards are changing to reflect demand for real world testing. Fortinet has been a leader in performing real-world firewall testing throughout their development and QA cycles, and their ability to realise these speeds under actual network conditions is a testament to what proper testing can produce,” he said.

The FortiGate-5140B achieves its high performance through the use of custom FortiASIC processors that are built on a technology platform first engineered at Fortinet more than 10 years ago, the statement said.

These processors provide the performance acceleration to block emerging threats, meet rigorous third-party certifications and ensure a particular FortiGate appliance doesn’t become a network bottleneck, it said.

Competing firewall manufacturers, on the other hand, tend to use consumer off-the-shelf processors (COTS) in their products. The downside to this approach is that such general purpose processors are not designed with security in mind and cannot meet the security demands of today’s high speed networks. – TradeArabia News Service