eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Network security specialist Fortinet’s latest firewall appliance, the FortiGate 5144C, exceeds 1 terabit per second throughput performance and offers 10GbE, 40GbE and 100GbE connectivity options, which it claims is the fastest available on the market.
Built for large-scale enterprise data center and carrier-class environments, the FortiGate 5000 series includes fully redundant, hot-swappable power supplies, fans and firewall blades for improved uptime.
The 5000 Series is comprised of a new chassis, the FortiGate 5144C, controller networking blades (5903C/5913C) and security blades (5001D) that utilize the latest NP6 network processor to deliver 40G bps firewall throughput.
“One of the many trends driving higher throughput requirements is big data,” Tamir Hardof, vice president of product marketing for Fortinet, told eWEEK. “This is the influx of data traffic from many sources like cloud apps and services and mobile devices. Making sure that your firewall is not a bottleneck to this data traffic is critical in maintaining business operations.”
For data centers or telecom environments that require 100 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, the FortiController-5913C controller blade, an Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) compliant session-aware load balancing hub/switch, distributes traffic among the new FortiGate-5001D blades within the 5000-series chassis fabric backplane.
Each 5001D blade embeds two FortiASIC NP6 processors, providing firewall capabilities such as deep packet inspection, application control and Web content filtering.
In addition, multiple virtual instances can run concomitantly, giving carriers the ability to offer thousands of dedicated firewall capabilities to their customers.
“For the very reasons of tight budgets and increasing threats, many small businesses turn to outsourcing with managed service providers who provide managed security services,” Hardof said. “The 5144C 1T bps firewall, with multi-tenant capable management, can allow these MSP’s to deliver a broad variety of security services to many managed customers. The customers benefit from greater throughput in their managed services as a result of the greater capacity delivered by the 5144C.”
Hardof noted that the 5144C shares the same high levels of scalability and resiliency as the rest of the 5000 Series line, while taking the high performance architecture to new levels–alleviating potential throughput bottlenecks while maintaining the high levels of service availability expected by carriers, telecoms and other large data center customers.
“Additionally, running on the latest FortiOS, the entire FortiGate line delivers new visibility tools, providing greater insight into network and threat status, as well as the ability to drill down and help mitigate the threats,” Hardof added.
The new FortiGate 5000 Series, complete with the 5144C Chassis, 5903C Controller and 5001D security blades, are available this quarter from authorized Fortinet channel partners, while the FortiController-5913C will be available in the fourth quarter.