Fortinet announced that SoftLayer Technologies has deployed Fortinet FortiGate-3810A multi-threat security systems at nationwide data centers to help secure customers' virtualized networks and protect them from malicious Internet attacks.

SoftLayer's firewall offering provides customers with an essential layer of security that can be provisioned on demand without service interruptions. Security solutions, and firewalls specifically, are a critical service offering for SoftLayer and its customers. A reliable and scalable solution was mandatory to meet customer expectations.

Fortinet delivers virtualized network security through its Virtual Domain (VDOM) technology, and offers the ability to create up to 250 independent security domains on a single FortiGate-3810A security appliance. Network security virtualization, using Fortinet's VDOM feature, provides a separately provisioned and managed security domain for each of SoftLayer's customers, giving SoftLayer administrators flexibility in policy configuration and traffic management capabilities for each customer.

Fortinet's FortiGate-3810A multi-threat security systems are helping to provide customers with firewall protection and are deployed at multiple SoftLayer locations including their Dallas, Texas datacenter; the Seattle, Wash. datacenter; and the new Washington, D.C. datacenter. Each FortiGate-3810A allows for up to 250 VDOMs, which enables SoftLayer to easily scale its business to meet the needs of additional customers while providing customers with their own security domain.

The VDOM functionality of the FortiGate systems allow for each virtualized security domain to be completely separated from other customer domains. SoftLayer indicated that its previous solution only allowed for partial separation of the domains which meant that when a distributed denial of service attack was launched, all virtualized domains could be affected. With Fortinet's solution, if a DoS attack is launched, only one domain would be affected resulting in more efficient network operations and reduced impact of these attacks on the customer servers.

"Since deploying the Fortinet solution at our nationwide data centers, we've been able to easily add new customers without having to bring on additional network resources," said Ric Moseley, vice president of Engineering at SoftLayer Technologies. "Fortinet's virtual domain functionality allows for us to easily scale and meet the rapidly growing needs of our business -- all while saving costs and improving customer satisfaction."

"Fortinet is at the leading edge of security virtualization functionality," said Karl Soderlund, vice president of Americas sales and business development for Fortinet. "FortiGate systems can easily scale to meet the needs of enterprises of all sizes, but are highly cost efficient for enterprises and carriers because of the available 250 virtual domains on the higher end appliances."