Network security appliance maker Fortinet Inc. has built a new network firewall appliance for enterprise data centres, large service providers, cloud providers, and carriers.
The California-based company announced it was releasing the FortiGate-3700 D today, which includes four 40 GbE (QSFP+) and 28 10 GbE (SFP+) ports. It can hit up to 160 gigabits per second for its firewall throughput. Fortinet says its newest product improves performance based on price per gigabit protected, price per port density, power dissipation per gigabit, and space per gigabit.
For many enterprise organizations, getting new high speed interfaces for their firewalls is one of the biggest reasons to invest in new firewalls in the first place. Many of them are choosing to upgrade to 10 GbE, 40 GbE, and eventually reach 100 GbE, according to a report by Infonetics Research, a market research firm focusing on the telecommunications space.
“For some time our data centre customers have been asking us for higher firewall throughput and high speed port connections as they consolidate data centres around a 40 or 100 Gbps switching infrastructure and fabric,” said Michael Xie, Fortinet’s founder, CTO, and vice-president of engineering, in a statement.
“We have an aggressive roadmap to deliver on these requests starting with the FortiGate-3700D.”
FortiGate-3700 uses FortiOS 5, the latest version of Fortinet’s network security operating system. It is touted as being more secure, as well as flexible enough to be used for large organizations and smaller businesses.
FortiOS 5 also lets users choose different ways to deploy it within the data centre. For example, there’s the core firewall option, which provides a high performance firewall with very low latency. That allows users to put in different trust levels for different firewall personalities, like a firewall with a virtual private network or with advanced threat protection.
And for more security options, Fortinet has allowed the FortiGate-3700D to come with network segmentation. The company offers physical, hybrid, or virtual network segmentation so network security service level agreements can be more customizable.
The FortiGate-3700D becomes available sometime this quarter, with more details available on Fortinet’s Web site.
