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October 5, 2010 - Fortinet® - a leading network security provider and the worldwide leader of unified threat management (UTM) solutions – today announced that the Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont (HMR), one of the largest hospitals in Eastern Canada, has deployed Fortinet appliances to help protect its network infrastructure.

Based in Montreal, Quebec, Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont is a thirteen story hospital that offers general medical care, but is better known for specializing in ophthalmology, stem cell treatments of various cancers and nephrology.

When it came time to update the previous Check Point firewall solution, HMR turned to Fortinet partner, Novipro in early 2010. One of the key selling features of the Fortinet solution was that the FortiGate appliances do not require servers in order for the appliances to work. The previous Check Point solution required four separate servers in order to log and report on network usage. With FortiGate appliances, all that is needed is a FortiManager or FortiAnalyzer appliance to manage logging and reporting. Additionally, HMR has been able to reduce maintenance costs because they’ve cut back the number of appliances being deployed, yet they have more network security functionality.

“The FortiGate solution was exactly what we were seeking. It allows us to have multiple security functionalities in a single appliance without causing network degradation,” said David Bernard, IT specialist in network and infrastructure at Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont. “We have also been able to reduce the space and capital needed to maintain our network.”

Two FortiGate-310B appliances are located in the Quebec hospital and are deployed in active/active mode. Fifty-five-hundred employees can now securely access more than 2,400 computers throughout HMR. There are also 150 remote users that connect to the HMR network from outside. For logging and management, HMR has deployed a FortiAnalyzer-1000 appliance.

Unique to Fortinet is the FortiASIC which allows for network acceleration without having the firewall bottleneck of a software-based solution. As such, after deploying FortiGate appliances in its network, there was a dramatic decrease in time to load a Web page. Previously it would take 15-20 seconds per page but since the FortiGate deployment, that has reduced to less than two seconds.

“The FortiGate appliances’ ASIC-based performance and network security functionality are key to network infrastructures where budgets tend to be tight yet there is a lot of traffic crossing the network,” said Graham Bushkes, vice president of Canadian sales at Fortinet. “We are pleased to have Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont as a Fortinet customer representing a very strong healthcare market.”