The FortiGate 4800F sports 2.4 Tbps throughput and hardware-accelerated VXLAN and DDoS protection.
Fortinet on Wednesday introduced a compact Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) targeted at hyperscale data centers and 5G networks. The FortiGate 4800F occupies four rack units while providing up to 2.4 terabits per second (2 Tbps) throughput. It includes 400 gigabit per second Ethernet (GbE), 200 GbE and 50 GbE ports for scalability depending on need, the company said.
“The combination of performance and scalability packed into our latest firewall will help future-proof organizations’ investments in hyperscale data centers, especially with the rise of 5G and as the volume and velocity of data continues to accelerate at an unprecedented pace,” said John Maddison, executive vice president of products and chief marketing officer at Fortinet.
Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) build on traditional firewall capabilities like packet filtering, network address translation (NAT) and virtual private network (VPN) capabilities with deep packet inspection, intrusion prevention and other techniques to maintain more performant and secure connections.
Specific to 5G, Fortinet said the 4800F enables massive machine-to-machine (M2M) connection that requires secure IP connectivity to untrusted environments like the Internet, edge sites, and cloud services. It can support 25 million connections per second. The 4800F also secures 5G RAN traffic and core connectivity with IPsec-based VPN performance that Fortinet clocks at 19x faster than previous models.
The secret behind the 4800F’s horsepower is the presence of 16 NP7 processors, according to the company. The NP7 is a purpose-designed Network Processing Unit (NPU) developed by Fortinet that accelerates network functions that would otherwise slow CPUs, like IPv4, IPv6, unicast and multicast, IPsec decryption, VXLAN termination and network address translation.
“With the increased scale of 5G radio and the sharing of RAN between operators to reduce costs, the FortiGate 4800F provides a cost-effective security gateway to handle 5G’s RAN scalability and security requirements for both user and control planes,” said the company.
When it comes to hyperscale and large enterprise data center installations, Fortinet claims to be the only vendor delivering 400GbE interfaces on a hyperscale firewall. The company said the 4800F has been designed to deliver significantly faster Secure Socket Layer (SSL) inspection compared to industry averages, and offers Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 protocol support. It supports Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) segmentation, to create massively scalable virtual overlay networks.
The device is managed using FortiGuard, Fortinet’s AI-driven security framework. FortiGuard provides real-time threat detection and security enforcement using context-driven policy management designed to support hybrid deployments in the cloud, on the enterprise network, and at endpoints. The company noted that the firewall also implements universal Zero Trust Network Architecture (ZTNA) support.
“Setting up universal ZTNA with an on-prem or virtual FortiGate ensures that consistent policies and controls span across all operating environments, including across multiple clouds,” said Fortinet.
