Today Juniper Networks enters the virtualization market with the acquisition of Altor Networks for $95M, one of the most interesting startup working on virtual data center security.
Altor’s flagship product, Virtual Firewall (VF), which reached version 4.0 in Q3, blends together firewall and intrusion detection system (IDS) technologies.
The former is a stateful filtering engine developed in house, which features very interesting capabilities like VM-level security policies, integration with VMware VMsafe APIs, dynamically-generated rulebases, and more.
The latter comes from the inclusion of the worldwide popular open source IDS engine Snort and an OEM agreement with SourceFire to resell their commercial attack signatures.
In March the startup closed a new round of funding, equal to $10M, led by DAG, Accel Partners, Foundation Capital and Juniper itself. Overall, Altor raised over $16M.
The $95M are net of Altor shares already owned by Juniper.
The networking giant already said that it will integrate this technology in its SRX Series routers.
Juniper already promoted the integration with Altor technology in a paper titled: Securing Virtual Server Environments with Juniper Networks and Altor Networks.
It will be interesting to see the innovation that the two will be able to introduce now if VF will become part of the Junos operating system.
With its current technology, Altor is very well positioned to offer relevant security solutions for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platforms.
Now, it’s just a matter of time before other network and security vendors will turn their attention to other virtualization security startups, like HyTrust, to develop cloud security solutions before customers will start demanding for them.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.