Fortinet® – a market-leading network security provider and worldwide leader of unified threat management (UTM) solutions – today announced it has acquired certain assets and intellectual property of Woven Systems, formerly a provider of Ethernet fabric switching solutions for the high-performance computing market. Woven’s high-speed switching and sophisticated traffic management technology will be used to further enhance the performance of Fortinet’s FortiGate®-5000 Series chassis-based security solutions.

Among Woven’s family of Ethernet switching products is one of the world’s smallest, densest and highest-performing 10 GbE switches, which attributes its speed to a custom-designed switching ASIC with unique traffic management capabilities. Fortinet intends to combine Woven’s technology with its own custom network and content processors for increased scalability, which will bring about additional acceleration of security throughput for its FortiGate-5000 Series appliances. Increased switching power in the chassis-based product means communications within and between security blades will happen at greater speeds and result in overall superior scalability and performance for Fortinet’s high-end customers, including large enterprises, carriers and service providers.

“Woven’s ASIC-driven approach to high performance is highly complementary to Fortinet’s own strategy for maximizing performance through customized processors,” said Ken Xie, CEO and co-founder, Fortinet. “This acquisition will harness the performance power of our respective technologies to offer tremendous benefits to customers who require the fastest and, often, the most mission-critical network security environments.”

Fortinet intends to continue selling certain Woven products and to provide support to new and existing customers who purchase FortiCare 24x7 support contracts.