Fortinet introduced two new FortiGate NGFWs for data centres- 3200F and 900G series; one aimed at very large, hyperscale data centres, and one aimed at mid-sized data centres. The 3200F series firewall is the next generation of its high-end 3200 series, purposely built for hyperscale data centres.
Shah said this new firewall, driven by Fortinet’s custom ASIC, has five to 10 times performance improvements and consumes 72% less energy than its competitors. It also offers four 400GE interfaces for high-traffic volume and scale management.
“These types of data centre appliances enable a very large enterprise, where they have unique use cases, to provide security protection,” he said. “We’re talking about a very large financial health care organisation, where the traffic pattern is so high, [but] there is a need for a low latency; this kind of architecture supports that.”
On the other hand, the 900G series firewall targets the mid-range market, such as firewall deployments for a large campus or a smaller data centre. Fortinet claims it offers six times the firewall throughput and three times the threat protection performance (20 Gb/s) than the industry average.
Nirav Shah highlighted that both- 3200F and 900G series are in a compact appliance form factor but not chassis.
“3200F has 400 gigabits of interface and, oftentimes when you’re looking at 400GE interface and 300 Gb/s-plus performance, many vendors need a chassis. But because of our approach to building an ASIC, we can create this architecture that comes in a compact form factor and still we can deliver a very high performance,” he said.
The firm predicts that more than 60% of organisations will have more than one type of firewall deployment by 2026, prompting the adoption of hybrid mesh firewalls.
