To expand its portfolio, Fortinet today introduced two new data center next-generation firewalls (NGFWs), one aimed at very large, hyperscale data centers, and one aimed at mid-sized data centers.

As network firewalls evolve into hybrid mesh firewalls, Fortinet claims the single operating system and unified management make its FortiGate NGFWs “an ideal fit” for a hybrid mesh firewall architecture.

Hybrid mesh firewalls are platforms that expand modern network firewall controls to multiple enforcement points including firewall-as-a-service and cloud firewalls, with a centralized and cloud-based manager to help secure the hybrid environment, according to Gartner.

The firm predicts that more than 60% of organizations will have more than one type of firewall deployment by 2026, prompting the adoption of hybrid mesh firewalls.

“Firewalls are not just a silo platform in one deployment; they are evolving to a hybrid mesh firewall across end-to-end technologies,” Nirav Shah, VP of products and solutions at Fortinet, told SDxCentral.

“What's unique that Fortinet has been driving is that the next generation firewall needs to have a single operating system, it needs to be driving AI [artificial intelligence]-powered services everywhere, and it needs to have a unified management,” he added.

Gartner named Fortinet as one of the leaders in its 2022 Magic Quadrant for Network Firewall report. FortiGate NGFWs utilize a single operating system — FortiOS, and a unified management console — FortiManager, integrated with AI-powered security across a hybrid environment. This includes on-premises, cloud, secure access service edge (SASE) and virtual machines.

Shah touted this hybrid mesh firewall architecture as helping customers stop threats and continue to consolidate and converge. For example, he said, a CIO can have the visibility of the organization’s network across on-premises, OT systems, multicloud and software-as-a-service to quickly identify issues and fine-tune policies and compliances, and automate this process with a hybrid mesh firewall architecture.

“Fortinet made deploying and managing next-gen firewalls across our on-premises, cloud and virtual environments simple. With FortiManager, we can view performance, unify policies and ensure our NGFWs are sharing threat information via a single pane of glass,” Joseph Neumann, deputy chief information security officer at Digital Realty, said in a statement.

Fortinet introduced two new FortiGate NGFWs for data centers — 3200F and 900G series.

The 3200F series firewall is the next generation of its high-end 3200 series, purposely built for hyperscale data centers.

Shah said this new firewall, driven by Fortinet’s custom ASIC,  has five to 10 times performance improvements and consumes 72% less energy than its competitors. It also offers four 400GE interfaces for high-traffic volume and scale management.

“These types of data center appliances enable a very large enterprise, where they have unique use cases, to provide the security protection,” he said. “We're talking about a very large financial health care organization, where the traffic pattern is so high, [but] there is a need for a low latency; this kind of architecture supports that.”

On the other hand, the 900G series firewall targets the mid-range market, such as firewall deployments for a large campus or a smaller data center. Fortinet claims it offers six times the firewall throughput and three times the threat protection performance (20 Gb/s) than the industry average.

Shah highlighted both the 3200F and 900G series are in a compact appliance form factor but not chassis.

“3200F has 400 gigabits of interface and, oftentimes when you're looking at 400GE interface and 300 Gb/s-plus performance, many vendors need a chassis. But because of our approach to building an ASIC, we can create this architecture [that] comes in a compact form factor and still we can deliver a very high performance,” he said.