Fortinet today announced three new next-generation firewalls (NGFW) for campus, branch, and hybrid data center environments. To address supply chain constraints, Fortinet re-engineered its firewalls to enable alternative part sourcing. 

“We truly believe that convergence is starting to happen between networking and security,” Fortinet CMO John Maddison told SDxCentral. “The ideal platform for convergence is a firewall.”

The FortiGate firewall portfolio is designed based on this convergence strategy. To better support more flexible and distributed firewall deployments, Fortinet added new appliances to this portfolio, including FortiGate 600F, 3700F, and 70F series. 

Powered by Fortinet’s custom seventh-generation network processor ASIC, FortiGate 600F targets the campus edge deployments and brings the vendor’s data-center-class capabilities to its mid-range line. 

“We are the only firewall company that designs our own ASICs for our products,” Maddison said. The chips enable “sometimes 10 to 20 times faster” connections per second compared to similar products, he claims. “It's not even in the same ballpark when people are using these off-the-shelf CPUs,” referring to Fortinet’s competitors.

It also allows the system to use up to 60% less power, which is in line with Fortinet’s commitment to achieving carbon neutrality by 2030. 

Plus, the chips can drive enough processing horsepower to support zero-trust network access (ZTNA) traffic on FortiGate firewalls, Peter Newton, senior director of product management at Fortinet, told SDxCentral. “No other firewall has ZTNA built-in, or custom security ASIC chips with hardware accelerators for the SSL decryption process,” he wrote in a blog post. ​​

Additionally, the 3700F series supports the hybrid IT networks, delivering high-speed connections between data centers and multi-cloud. It is “the only appliance in the market with 400Gb/s interfaces” with ultra-low latency at nearly two microseconds, Maddison said. 

The last one is FortiGate 70F which is a refresh from its 60F firewall series for branch offices. On top of better performance, it is re-designed to address the supply chain challenges.

Maddison expects the supply constraints will persist for at least another 12 to 18 months. As a result, Fortinet is taking the proactive strategy of diversifying the supply chains.

Fortinet customers and partners are all worried about the supply issues, Maddison noted. Because of this, Fortinet started redesigning products and building new firewalls upfront.

“Fortinet as a company is not waiting until the supply chain thing is over. We're not gonna sit here and wait for the chips to arrive in 2023,” he said. “We're redesigning products and [FortiGate] 70F is a good example that takes advantage of multiple sourcing of components.”

The vendor aims to release the three new FortiGate firewall series in the second quarter of this year. “We're not building it just in time when we get an order. We're building hundreds of thousands upfront, which again, has helped us during the supply chain issue,” he added.