Fortinet, a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions, has announced the FortiGate 4800F series of hyperscale firewalls, which sets new standards for security, scale, performance and innovation to meet the requirements of hyperscale customers and 5G mobile network operators (MNOs).

Powered by 16 of Fortinet’s seventh-generation network processors (NP7), FortiGate 4800F offers the highest performance figures of any compact firewall, with Security Compute Ratings that deliver up to 34x better performance than competitor solutions, including the ability to support an average of 19 times more connections per second.

“No other firewall is better suited to support hyperscale and 5G. Not only is FortiGate 4800F the industry’s fastest compact hyperscale firewall, with 2.4Tbit/s of capacity, but it is also the only 4RU chassis on the market that includes 400GbE, 200GbE and 50GbE ports, which allow hyperscale customers and mobile network operators to seamlessly scale their business without disrupting operations. The combination of performance and scalability packed into our latest firewall will help future-proof organisations’ investments in hyperscale data centres, especially with the rise of 5G and as the volume and velocity of data continues to accelerate at an unprecedented pace.” — John Maddison, executive vice president of products and chief marketing officer at Fortinet

Large enterprises and MNOs are in continual pursuit of doing more with less. When it comes to firewalls, higher performance in a smaller footprint means security becomes an enabler for 5G adoption, allowing mobile providers to deliver new use cases for enterprises and critical industries and infrastructure. It also ensures enterprise customers such as high-velocity e-retail, cutting-edge research facilities, financial institutions and cloud providers have access to the performance, scalability and security they need to meet escalating business needs. Reduced costs for space, cooling and power are additional benefits to achieving higher performance in a smaller form factor.

With these outcomes in mind, Fortinet’s dedication to pushing the boundaries of what is possible in security performance has yielded the most powerful compact firewall yet: the FortiGate 4800F. With a 4RU chassis and 400GbE, 200GbE and 50GbE interfaces, this latest model of Fortinet’s flagship line of firewalls enables MNOs to secure 5G networks with the following capabilities:

Accelerates 5G adoption with secure IP connectivity and support for 19 times more connections per second: 5G enables massive machine-to-machine communication that requires secure IP connectivity to untrusted environments such as the Internet, edge sites and the cloud. The FortiGate 4800F enables MNOs to secure massive scale and performance for IP connectivity to external networks and domains with massive carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) performance and hardware logging. To build capacity that meets the needs of today and the future, FortiGate 4800F supports 25 million connections per second to give MNOs the capacity they need to handle surges in traffic and large sustained loads of subscriber connections. Enterprises with ultra-performance needs can converge multiple firewalls into a single unified system, host on-premises applications and deliver the required user experience.
Secures 5G radio access network (RAN) traffic and core connectivity with 19 times faster IPsec VPN performance: With the increased scale of 5G radio and the sharing of RANs between operators to reduce costs, the FortiGate 4800F provides a cost-effective security gateway (SecGW or SEG) to handle 5G’s RAN scalability and security requirements for both user and control planes.

FortiGate 4800F also delivers hyperscale security for hyperscale data centres with the following capabilities:

Enables 400G ultra-fast data center interconnect: With 400GbE ports in a compact 4RU form factor, FortiGate 4800F allows organisations to connect and replicate data securely with ultra-fast elephant flows, while ensuring privacy and confidentiality to guarantee that all data and services are delivered close to the customers and partners. Enterprises with ultra-performance needs can converge multiple firewalls into a single unified system, host on-premises applications and deliver the required user experience. In April 2021, Fortinet became the first vendor to deliver 400GbE ports on a hyperscale firewall via FortiGate 7121F, followed by the FortiGate 3700F in May 2022. FortiGate 4800F continues Fortinet’s legacy as the only vendor delivering 400GbE interfaces on a hyperscale firewall to support the most intensive hyperscale use cases.
Removes blind spots with six times faster SSL inspection: With as much as 95% of today’s traffic being encrypted, SSL inspection has become critical to properly secure the network. While encrypted paths are meant to make traffic more secure, they also let bad actors hide malicious activity. To allow all encrypted traffic to be inspected while keeping up with the speed of today’s networks, FortiGate 4800F offers the industry’s highest SSL-inspection performance as well as support for the industry’s latest TLS 1.3 standard. This also ensures network blind spots are eliminated by enabling full visibility of clear-text and encrypted network flows.
Secures hybrid IT architectures with VXLAN segmentation: Digital acceleration is only possible with hybrid IT architectures that seamlessly connect and secure on-prem and cloud assets. The FortiGate 4800F enables massively scalable hardware-accelerated Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) segmentation and allows super-fast communication between enormously scaled services, such as compute, storage and applications that are co-hosted on physical and virtual platforms.

The entire FortiGate suite of next-generation and hyperscale firewalls supports organisations of all sizes with the following features:

High-performance security at scale: FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services deliver innovative real-time protection for known, zero-day and unknown threats, including IPS, DNS, AV and inline sandbox, for data centre edge and core deployments leveraging segmentation and more granular device (OT/IoT) as well as Web and application security capabilities for comprehensive perimeter protection.
Supports zero trust architectures with integrated universal ZTNA: FortiGate natively integrates universal zero trust network access (ZTNA) enforcement to support zero trust architectures. Setting up universal ZTNA with an on-prem or virtual FortiGate ensures that consistent policies and controls span across all operating environments, including across multiple clouds.

FortiGate 4800F vs competitors

Below is a comparison of the top firewalls on the market against the target performance numbers of the FortiGate 4800F series. Security Compute Rating is a benchmark (performance multiplier) that compares FortiGate performance versus the industry average of competing products across various categories that fall within the same price band.

Specification	FortiGate 4801F¹	Security compute rating	Industry average	Palo Alto NetworksPA-5450³	Check PointQuantum 28000	CiscoFirepower 4145	JuniperSRX5400⁴
Firewall	2.4Tbit/s	15x	158Gbit/s	136.4Gbit/s	145Gbit/s	80Gbit/s	270Gbit/s
IPsec VPN	800Gbit/s	19x	42Gbit/s	34.8Gbit/s	49Gbit/s	23Gbit/s	60Gbit/s
Threat protection⁵	70Gbit/s	1.5x	46Gbit/s	61.8Gbit/s	30Gbit/s	N/A	N/A
SSL inspection	55Gbit/s	5.5x	10Gbit/ss	-	-	10Gbit/s	N/A
Concurrent sessions	280M/ 1760M²	34x	51M	40M	32M	40M	91M
Connections per second	900K/ 25M²	19x	1.3M	1.45M	615k	1.5M	1.7M

Non-SSD variant is available as well
Performance with hyperscale license applied
PAN: Calculated with 2xNC and 2xDPC cards
Juniper: SRX5400E-B2
Threat Protection includes FortiGuard Application Control, AI-Powered FortiGuard IPS, Anti-Virus, Logging and Sandbox security services