Fortinet has introduced a series of high performance security blades and chassis into the Australian carrier and managed service provider market.

Falling under the FortiGate 5000 product line series, the products include three new chassis and blades and load balancing devices.

The chassis come in two (FortiGate 5020), four (FortiGate 5040) and 14 (FortiGate 5140) slot configurations, with each slot yielding 4Gbps throughput.

The company is also selling three blades which slot into the new chassis. The FortiGate 5001 is fibre based, FortiGate 5002 copper based; and FortiGate-5005 copper and fibre based.

The company also introduced a 10Gbps security blade for screening high-volume traffic in large organizations.

The FortiController 5208 blade can aggregate traffic from smaller Fortinet security blades for uplinks to 10Gbps backbones. The device supports a firewall, VPN, anti-virus, anti-spyware and intrusion-prevention software.

The software is sold in modules so a blade can perform one or more functions, and those functions can be changed over time as needs change. It meets Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture standards, which means it works in chassis built by other vendors whose gear meets the standards.

Andrew Bycroft, sales engineer in the company's Sydney office said all the unified threat management tools, such as its AV and intrusion prevention software were developed in house.

"They are tightly integrated components. We don't rely on third party software that might not talk with our hardware."

The 5208 is available in the second half of 2006 and costs US$45,000. Chassis and blades will start from $50,000 and are available now.