Fortinet Unveils Data Center Firewall Appliance

Fortinet today announced a new high performance, compact network firewall appliance for enterprise data centers, large service providers, cloud providers and carriers. The new FortiGate®-3700D, which includes four 40 GbE (QSFP+) and 28 10GbE (SFP+) ports, is able to achieve up to 160 Gigabits per second (Gbps) firewall throughput. Using Fortinet's new custom NP6 ASIC, the FortiGate-3700D is able to deliver best-in-class performance, low latency and IPv4 to IPv6 performance parity. Fortinet is the first network security company to deliver 100 Gbps+ firewall throughput and 40 GbE ports in a compact appliance, which redefines the standard for price per gigabit protected, price per port density, power dissipation per gigabit and space per gigabit. This performance improvement lowers both capital and operational costs for customers while providing the highest performance and lowest latency available.

Data Center Customers Feel the Need for Speed
Infonetics recently conducted a high speed firewall survey of large organizations (over 1,000 employees) that have already deployed high-end firewalls, defined as firewalls that currently support greater than 40 Gbps aggregate throughput. The move to faster network technologies is forcing enterprises to look at upgrading every component of their IT infrastructure, and the need to add new high speed interfaces to firewalls (10 GbE, 40 GbE and eventually 100 GbE) tops the list of drivers for investing in new high-end firewalls.

Jeff Wilson of Infonetics commented: "After port speeds, we asked respondents to tell us what maximum stateful inspection throughput they will require their high-end firewalls to support in the next year, and over 80% are looking for platforms with over 100 Gbps of aggregate performance, with the largest group looking for 100 Gbps to 199 Gbps." He continued: "Having high speed interfaces means nothing unless the device has the throughput to match."