Data centers are in the midst of an evolution that transcends public cloud to hybrid platforms, and some people have gone as far to say that they will disappear completely in the coming years. But the data center isn't dead; in fact, it will always be an important part of any architecture.

And with an expanding threat landscape and increasingly sophisticated attacks, securing the data center is more important than ever before.

The all-new FortiGate 7081F Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) provides increased threat protection, performance, and energy efficiency to secure the modern data center.

Meet the All-New FortiGate 7081F

The all-new FortiGate 7081F sets the standard for comprehensive data center security that protects mission-critical data across hybrid IT infrastructure.

Performance and security are the two pillars of any NGFW, and, compared to the industry standard, the FortiGate 7081F delivers a security compute rating of:

• 5x NGFW firewall performance
• 2x better threat protection
• 2x IPSec VPN throughput

And it's 73% more energy efficient per Gbps of firewall throughput compared to the industry standard.

Eliminate Point Products and Reduce Complexity

Like all FortiGate NGFWs, the FortiGate 7081F eliminates point products, reduces complexity, and enables the industry's best performance and ROI.

One of Fortinet's founding principles is that security devices should never become a performance bottleneck. The FortiGate 7081F delivers 1.2 Tbps of firewall throughput coupled with 312 Gbps of threat protection using 60% fewer watts of Gbps threat protection compared to the industry average.

Scaling without disrupting operations is a concern for many organizations, which is why the FortiGate 7081F was built to reduce the need for point products and to simplify operations. It includes a high-power, energy-efficient eight-slot chassis that can house up to six Fortinet Processor Modules (FPMs) and includes 400GE ports that empower businesses to meet their evolving needs. (Fortinet remains the only firewall vendor to offer 400GE ports.)

The ASIC Advantage

Like all FortiGate solutions, the cornerstone of the FortiGate 7081F's performance and power savings is proprietary ASIC security processing units (SPU) specifically engineered for security and networking purposes. 

Our NP7 network processor delivers industry-leading VXLAN hardware acceleration and IPsec Elephant flows. The NP7 is designed to accelerate essential network functions such as IPv4, IPv6, Multicast, GRE, and IPsec decryption, among others.

And the FortiGate 7081F supports 4.5 million connections per second session setup speeds for firewall and NAT sessions, delivering hyperscale security for hyperscale data centers.

The FortiGate 7081F also addresses the need to find and mitigate risk as quickly as possible. Our CP9 content processor acts as a co-processor to the main CPU to offload resource-intensive processing and drive content inspection to accelerate security functions. Additionally, the CP9 performs fast inspection of real-time traffic for application identification, all without compromising user experience. It enables full network visibility, thus eliminating blind spots.

The parallel path processing architecture embodied with our latest NP7 and CP9 security processors offers unmatched L4-L7 performance.

These all-new capabilities build on the industry-leading security and threat detection included in all of Fortinet's NGFW offerings:

• FortiOS, the foundation of Fortinet's Security Fabric (the industry's highest-performing cybersecurity mesh platform), enables our NGFWs to converge threat intelligence and the firewall chassis. A single operating system provides centralized and unified management and visibility across the network.
• FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services, developed by FortiGuard Labs (Fortinet's elite cybersecurity research organization), deliver coordinated detection and enforcement across the entire attack surface
• Intrusion prevention provides the most up-to-date defenses against stealthy network-level threats to protect organizations from thousands of IPS signatures covering known vulnerabilities and exploits.
• Application control service quickly creates policies to allow, deny, or restrict access to applications or entire categories of applications to keep malicious, risky, and unwanted applications out of your network through control points like the data center.

Hybrid Mesh Firewall Ready

As businesses increasingly turn to hybrid environments to address the rise in cloud-based applications and remote workforces, it's critical for NGFWs, including FortiGate solutions like the FortiGate 7081F, to work in conjunction with firewalls deployed across the network-including in the cloud.

Hybrid mesh firewall is an emerging term for a unified security platform that provides coordinated protection to multiple areas of enterprise IT, including corporate sites such as branches, campuses, and data centers; public and private clouds; and remote workers.

Because FortiGate, and all other Fortinet firewall solutions, is built on FortiOS, Fortinet has delivered on the hybrid mesh firewall concept for years. Using Fortinet solutions empowers IT teams with centralized and unified management and an open ecosystem that enables consistent security policies across all firewall deployments.  

To learn more about the FortiGate 7081F and associated services for the data center, please visit the Fortinet NGFW web page.