New Patents Strengthen Fortinet Intellectual Property Portfolio

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Patented technology enables Fortinet to further enhance virtualized network security capabilities of FortiGate appliances.

Fortinet, the pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions, announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has awarded the company five additional patents for networking inventions, specifically supporting virtualization. The patents are part of the intellectual property Fortinet acquired from CoSine Communications, Inc., in a series of transactions between January 19, 2006, and December 7, 2006, which Fortinet's development team is leveraging to enhance virtualization capabilities already available in its FortiGate™ multi-threat security appliances.

The five newly awarded patents strengthen Fortinet's intellectual property portfolio and provide the company with ownership of key innovations that address critical networking, virtualization and routing needs of large enterprises, managed security service providers and carriers. Fortinet currently holds 13 patents and has more than 80 patent-pending and in-process applications.

The latest patents include: U.S. Patent #7,203,192 -Network Packet Steering; U.S. Patent #7,263,106 - System and Protocol for Frame Relay Service over the Internet; U.S. Patent #7,266,120 - System and Method for Hardware Accelerated Packet Multicast in a Virtual Routing System; U.S. Patent #7,272,643 - System and Method for Managing and Provisioning Virtual Routers; and U.S. Patent #7,278,055 - System and Method for Virtual Router Failover in a Network Routing System.

As networks proliferate and large enterprises, carriers and MSSPs build out more and more complicated infrastructures to support business-critical applications, the need for securing, segmenting and protecting those networks and applications increases. Virtualization provides a method for allowing this type of segmentation, while also consolidating multiple networking devices, reducing network hardware and switch ports, and decreasing operational data center costs.