New Fortinet Firewall Adds to Growing SD-WAN Heft

Written by Lynn Haber
October 31, 2019

SD-WAN and security go together like chocolate and peanut butter.

Fortinet’s popular FortiGate Secure SD-WAN just got a new addition – the FortiGate 60F – which includes the vendor’s new purpose-built system on a chip 4 (SoC4) security processor, first announced in April.

FortiGate says the 60F firewall, powered by the vendor’s SoC4, delivers the best performance and security for SD-WAN, to help support customers’ WAN edge transformation.

Fortinet’s Nirav Shah

“In the enterprise market, customers are consolidating security, SD-WAN and routing. They need appliances powered by a special built processor, so they have the best performance and user experience,” Nirav Shah, senior director products and solutions at Fortinet, told Channel Futures.

Some key features of the FortiGate 60F:

FortiGate 60F aims to consolidate SD-WAN, advanced routing and advanced security capabilities into a single appliance that enables network engineers to deploy Secure SD-WAN quickly and easily, while also reducing complexity by consolidating point products into a single offering. This allows high performance and improved user experience at an optimal total cost of ownership (TCO).
This latest offering helps customers maintain high quality user experience for their business-critical traffic, such as SaaS, multicloud or unified communications. FortiGate 60F is designed to deliver best-in-class application steering, giving visibility to all traffic – including encrypted traffic – without impacting performance and ensuring all critical applications are routed to their best path.
The FortiGate 60F leverages security-driven networking principles – powered by Fortinet’s patented SoC4 security processor – to deliver the fastest deep inspection of SSL/TLS encrypted traffic (including the industry’s first support for TLS 1.3) at 750Mbps. The FortiGate 60F offers comprehensive threat protection with IPS, application control and antimalware at 700Mbps to help customers protect their networks without impacting performance.

IHS Markit reported in its recent second-quarter market share results for SD-WAN, that Fortinet moved into fourth place behind VMware, Cisco and Aryaka but ahead of Silver Peak, Nuage Networks and Huawei.

In Gartner’s Market Share: Enterprise Network Equipment by Market Segment, Worldwide 2Q19, published in September, total revenue was $13.4 billion, up 10% from the first quarter and up 9.4% year over year. Software-defined WAN and firewall equipment were the two network equipment segments that saw the greatest annual increase.

Fortinet was among the top three vendors in worldwide market share for SD-WAN equipment by revenue in the second quarter.

“We had the highest growth of all SD-WAN vendors in the market. We’re very excited that the technology that we have, the customer momentum that we’re seeing, and how our partners are offering this technology is helping us in all directions,” said Shah.

For partners already focused on FortiGate, SD-WAN is built-in functionality and there are new approaches that partners can take beyond security.

The new FortiGate 60F targets the distributed enterprise or businesses with many branch locations.