Posted by Bangalore: FortiGate 4400F is claimed to be the world’s first hyperscale firewall from Fortinet. With this Fortinet has brought the convergence of security and networking resulting in security-driven networking.
The company said its new hyperscale firewall FortiGate 4400F has set new milestones for Security Compute Ratings. It delivers unparalleled performance, scalability and security in a single appliance to meet growing business needs.
FortiGate 4400F runs on Fortinet’s latest seventh-generation network processor (NP7) that offers hardware-acceleration, making it fast enough to secure hyperscale datacentres and 5G networks.
“FortiGate 4400F Network Firewall delivers unprecedented scale and performance that is up to 13 times better than comparable products,” said Rajesh Maurya, Regional VP – India & SAARC, Fortinet.
“As the only network firewall capable of securing hyperscale datacentres and 5G networks, FortiGate 4400F leads the industry in what is possible for datacentre security,” added Maurya.
Hyperscale datacentres require hyperscale security
Many organisations today have successfully deployed hyperscale network architectures but attaining hyperscale security remains a key significant challenge.
So far, some vendors claim to have implemented hyperscale security using multiple firewalls orchestrated together to achieve a hyperscale architecture but it’s cumbersome and expensive.
The hardware acceleration via FortiGate 4400F’s purpose-built NP7 network processors delivers security, performance and scale. And that keeps up with the growth of today’s hyperscale datacentres and enables the following use cases:
High Velocity e-Retail: Allows high-velocity e-retail businesses to deliver the best possible user experience for their customers by supporting tens of millions of connections per second, enabling essential layer 4 security, and delivering hardware-accelerated prevention of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Cutting-edge research: Enhances productivity for cutting-edge research facilities and other verticals like oil and gas by supporting the secure transfer of extremely large datasets – also known as elephant flows – of up to 100Gbps. For situations that require encrypting at high speeds, IPsec can be turned on non-intrusively to support high-bandwidth IPsec tunnel flows.
Financial institutions, cloud providers and other large enterprises: Allows businesses to launch services in the most agile and secure fashion possible to increase productivity and revenue.
By accelerating VXLAN-based segmentation, FortiGate 4400F enables super-fast communication between massively scaled services (such as compute, storage, or apps) that are co-hosted on physical and virtualized domains. These large scale segments can be protected with essential Layer 4 or advanced Layer 7 security.
5G Speeds Need Security at Scale
Most solutions lack the required scale to overcome IPv4 address scarcity, growing mobile bandwidth demands and increasing numbers of encrypted tunnels connecting infrastructure. And this in turn holds carriers back from being able to support a large set of customers. FortiGate 4400F uniquely addresses these pain points, delivering:
Carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) that enables hyperscale Packet Delivery Network (PDN). While preserving user experience with hardware-accelerated user session setup rates, low latency and hardware-assisted logging for audit and control.
Critical scale for Security Gateway (SecGW) at 4G and 5G mobile for Radio Access Network (RAN) control to enable services providers to build high capacity networks that maximize return on investment.
Allows service providers to differentiate their customer offerings by delivering additional value-added services such as parental control with technologies like URL filtering.
FortiGate 4400F vs. Competitors
Below is a comparison of the top firewalls on the market against the FortiGate 4400F series. Security Compute Rating is a benchmark (performance multiplier) that compares FortiGate Network Firewall performance versus the industry average of competing products across various categories that fall within the same price band.
| Specification | FortiGate 4401F | Industry Average | Security Compute Rating | Palo Alto PA-70502 | Checkpoint CP28000 | Cisco FPR-4145 | Juniper SRX54003 |
| Firewall | 1.2Tbps | 165Gbps | 7x | N/A | 145Gbps | 80Gbps | 270Gbps |
| Concurrent Sessions | 600M1 | 46M | 13x | 32M | 32M | 30M | 91M |
| Connections per Second | 10M1 | 0.822M | 12x | 623K | 615k | 350k | 1.7M |
| IPsec VPN | 420Gbps | 39Gbps | 11x | 28Gbps | 49Gbps | 18Gbps | 60Gbps |
| Threat Protection | 70Gbps | 34Gbps | 2x | 37Gbps | 30Gbps | N/A | N/A |
| SSL Inspection | 65Gbps | 10Gbps | 6.5x | N/A | N/A | 10Gbps | N/A |
- Target values – Enabled by a Hyperscale License
- PAN: Calculated with 1-NPC (100G-NPC) cards, no services and support
- Juniper: SRX5400E-B2-AC
FortiGate 4400F offers the highest performance with Security Compute Ratings up to 13x better than the competition. As a result, organisations can have more headroom for digital innovation with Fortinet TCO savings and have the resources to respond to unexpected events.
Powered by Security-driven Networking
FortiGate 4400F leverages security-driven networking principals to enable ultra-scalable, secure distributed networks and hyperscale datacentres.
Security-driven Networking solutions are not only faster and scale further than the competition, but are also much more cost-effective, delivering the best price/performance in a compact form factor for additional lower costs associated with lower rack space, power and cooling requirements.
Fortinet also offers automation and orchestration capabilities as part of Fabric Management Centre and FortiOS. Additionally, Fortinet continues to be a proponent of Open APIs and is committed to support industry initiatives like OpenConfig with the goal of delivering automation to streamline operations.
The FortiGate 4400F, as a part of an integrated security platform via the Fortinet Security Fabric, also provides security for hybrid datacentres as follows:
- Protection from known attacks with AI-powered FortiGuard services including web filtering and intrusion prevention system services.
- Proactive threat detection for any segmentation that a customer plans to adopt with a Security Compute Rating of 2x.
- Full visibility into threats and removes blind spots with SSL inspection including TLS 1.3 that is 6.5x better than competing products.
Protection of business critical applications and servers by offering virtual patching using high performance consolidated IPS.
“FortiGate is a long-term advanced security solution that consolidates point-products and reduces cost and complexity. FortiGate 4400F will uniquely allow us to provide hyperscale security solutions that preserve user experience and business growth for our largest customers,” said Michael J. McGlynn, VP – Global Security, WWT
“Hyperscale datacentres and 5G networks have the biggest need for security that can keep pace with unprecedented user and enterprise demands,” said Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst – ZK Research
“Fortinet is delivering security performance figures that far exceed those of competitor solutions to finally give hyperscale organisations the ability to efficiently and effectively secure their business,” added Kerravala.