Fortinet announces FortiGate 100F

April 26, 2019 Marcel Zimmer
Fortinet

The manufacturer Fortinet Networks has already caused quite a stir again. In addition to a sneak peek at 360° support and their new SD-WAN technology, Fortinet presented another tidbit on their blog earlier this month: the FortiGate 100F.

What is the FortiGate 100F?

The FortiGate 100F is a high-performance firewall in the more affordable price zone. What makes it special is not only its remarkable performance, but also its 2x 10Gbit fibre ports, which are actually more likely to be found in the high-end range. In addition, it is already equipped with FortiOS firmware 6.2, which provides the firewall with everything it needs to take advantage of the renewed SD-WAN technology.

What is Fortinet's new SD-WAN technology?

The FortiGate 100F is the first firewall to offer hardware acceleration for SD-WAN with the SoC4 ASIC chip. This not only offers faster application identification, but also the ability to control over 5,000 devices. This eliminates the delays in access times of multi-user applications and makes the user interface run more smoothly. It also allows business-critical applications to be controlled in a user-friendly way.

What does the SD-WAN ASIC change in the FortiGate 100F?

The FortiGate 100F's information so far already suggests enormous potential. The pure throughput without further protection functions is up to 20Gbps. But even with IPS inspection, the firewall is said to still have a throughput of 1.6Gbps. In addition, a comparison was made of what the new SD-WAN ASIC brings in terms of increased throughput. Among other things, the VPN throughput, which is in the range of 0.6 Gbps with conventional SD-WAN solutions, is clearly exceeded with 11.5 Gbps. This means an increase of almost 20 times. Furthermore, significantly more simultaneous overlay tunnels are possible; instead of 200 possible overlay tunnels, up to 2500 are available.
The manufacturer has tested the values for the New-Generation-Firewall throughput and SSL transmission for the FortiGate 100F, also based on the new SD-WAN ASIC technology. The results are 0.8 Gbps for NGFW throughput and 1 Gbps for SSL.
The firewall thus not only has the usual RJ45 ports and the 1 GE SFP port flexibly available, but also 2x 10 GE SFP+ ports. These were previously reserved for firewalls in higher price segments. This makes the firewall both attractively priced and equipped for high demands in the future.

Author: Marcel Zimmer

Marcel Zimmer is the Technical Managing Director of EnBITCon. During his time in the German Armed Forces, the trained IT developer was able to gain numerous project experiences. His interest in IT security was significantly awakened by his service in command support. Even after his service, he is an active reservist in the Bundeswehr.

His first firewall was a Sophos UTM 120, which he had to set up for a customer project. Since then, his interest in IT security has grown steadily. In the course of time, various security and infrastructure topics have come into his focus. His most interesting projects included, for example, WLAN coverage in an explosion-proof area, as well as a multi-site WLAN solution for a large