Abstract

iPolicy Networks commissioned The Tolly Group to evaluate and compare its iPolicy-6420 Intrusion Prevention Firewall with Fortinet’s FortiGate-3600 anti-virus firewall. Both devices are multifunction security appliances designed to protect data networks from a wide range of security threats with no compromise to network performance. Both products are marketed to service providers and large enterprises.

Tests focused on three main functional areas: UDP frame loss, TCP/UDP per-second connection rate, and the ability to establish new connections per second when the device already has a large number of connections active. Tests were conducted during August 2004.

The iPolicy-6420 consistently delivered high performance in every test scenario, even with a range of security applications running. That was not the case with the FortiGate-3600; it demonstrated significantly high frame loss, significantly lower TCP/UDP connection rates, and was barely able to complete any transactions successfully under such test scenarios.