Altor VF

High Performance Protection for Virtual Networks

Filtering traffic to and from a virtualization server, or a server cluster, is only a piece of the virtual security puzzle. To truly mitigate the risks within the virtual environment – especially those related to inter-VM communication – defense-in-depth at the level of individual VMs is required. An effective, multi-layered defense is only feasible if it maintains the productive capacity of the host servers it resides on. And for self-protection, in must not run in the same context as the malware it defends against.

The Altor virtual firewall exceeds these requirements in several ways. By enforcing policies at the VM level, integrating IDS, securing live migrations, and delivering much higher performance than other firewalls, it actually helps enterprises increase host capacity utilization. And since it’s a kernel module rather than a guest VM, the Altor firewall defends itself and the hypervisor against VM layer attacks.

The Altor firewall has set new standards for the extent and performance of virtualization security:

  • Per-VM Enforcement of policies integrating firewall and IDS rules provides granular visibility and control of inter-VM and other virtual network traffic. Enforcing individual or group VM policies stops inter-VM malware propagation more effectively than one-size-fits-all rule bases. Default policies are automatically applied to every new VM, mitigating the risks of VM sprawl.
  • High Performance VMsafe Firewall processes stateful inspections in the VMware hypervisor kernel, enhancing security, eliminating network reconfigurations, and providing 10X more throughput than non-VMsafe virtual firewalls. The Altor firewall’s breakthrough 10Gbps performance supports more VMs per host, and therefore higher virtualization ROI.
  • Guaranteed VM Isolation between and within trust levels (e.g., production, QA) makes virtualizing mission critical systems and customer data viable. This further boosts the ratio of VMs to host servers, giving enterprises a greater return on their virtualization investments.
  • Virtual IDS Integration with the virtual firewall in a single kernel module improves security and reduces the number of security products needed to protect virtualized data centers.
  • Secure VMotion Live Migrations are achieved by continuous firewall policy enforcement as VMs automatically move from host to host. The Altor firewall maintains each VM’s open connections and security during migration, making virtualized security invisible to end users.
  • Hypervisor Protection monitors & stores all network connections to the hypervisor using VMsafe APIs. The Altor virtual firewall provides a new layer of hypervisor and self-protection by blocking attacks and other unauthorized connection attempts from VMs.

Altor Network’s virtual firewall helps enterprises achieve the full ROI of virtualization by maximizing the number of secure VMs per physical host and by providing the tight security that is a prerequisite for virtualizing mission critical systems. To get immediate access to a live interactive demo, and/or request a free 30 day evaluation of the complete Altor VF solution, click here.