Fortinet debuts firewall for hyperscale data centres

Security has emerged as a choke point for traffic entering and exiting most hyperscale data centres, affecting user experience and slowing down productivity. Fortinet wants to overcome this bottleneck with its first hyperscale firewall, the FortiGate 4400F.

While many organisations have successfully deployed hyperscale network architectures, achieving hyperscale security has been a significant challenge. Many current hyperscale security architectures involve piecing together multiple firewalls, which is both cumbersome and expensive.

The FortiGate 4400F, powered by the seventh-generation NP7 network processors, offers a single compact appliance architecture designed with the security performance and scale for today’s hyperscale data centres.

Use cases

The FortiGate 4400F allows high-velocity e-retail businesses by supporting tens of millions of connections per second, enabling layer 4 security, and delivering hardware-accelerated prevention of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

The appliance can enhance productivity for 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.

For financial institutions, cloud providers and other large enterprises, accelerating VXLAN-based segmentation enables the FortiGate 4400F to deliver fast communication between massively scaled services (such as compute, storage, or apps) that are co-hosted on physical and virtualised domains. These large-scale segments can be protected with Layer 4 or Layer 7 security.

5G

As the world transitions to 5G, security demands will be pushed to their limits as network operation teams must ensure both security and business continuity. The required scale to overcome IPv4 address scarcity, growing mobile bandwidth demands, and increasing numbers of encrypted tunnels connecting infrastructure, holds carriers back from being able to support a large set of customers.

With the FortiGate 4400F, Fortinet seeks to address these pain points by delivering a network address translation (CGNAT) architecture that enables hyperscale Packet Delivery Network (PDN) with hardware-accelerated user session setup rates, low latency and hardware-assisted logging for audit and control.

It also enables scale for Security Gateway at 4G and 5G mobile for Radio Access Network control to enable service providers to build high capacity networks.

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