Fortinet's latest firewall promises hyperscale security while sipping power Fortinet claims its latest firewall can secure an entire datacenter while consuming about a quarter the power of its competitors. On Tuesday the security vendor unveiled the FortiGate 7081F, a next-gen firewall (NGFW) targeting hyperscale datacenters that need to inspect large volumes of traffic traveling both in and out and …
Nobody is going to blink at using 7kW of power, even if it means having to draw power from 2 racks.
Likely any such facility hosting such a piece of equipment with bandwidth needs in excess of 100Gbps will easily have enough power budget in a rack to run it, one thing to be careful of though would be to ensure the cabinet has 3 PDUs from 3 different sources of power/generators, and put two PSUs on each PDU. Technically with the specs you could draw 7kW on 3 PSUs on a single feed, but personally wouldn't feel comfortable pushing things to that kind of limit. Though likely real power draw will be far less than the peak, so probably doesn't matter.
I had one service provider several years ago go down at one site(not a site I was hosted at but still impacted the routing in the region), and it was due to a power outage, but more specifically whomever set up the equipment for whatever reason, had all of their core router PSUs hooked to the same UPS/generator(when the facility they were at had multiple). So clearly setup incorrectly and eventually bit them in the ass when that one feed went down, took out their core router(s). The whole facility didn't go dark just one set of feed(s).
They owned up to it quick after I drilled them, and committed to fixing it fast. Stupid mistake, but the provider has a 100% uptime SLA with their customers so not a mistake that should of ever happened.
For our government and military clients, SuperCybex has frequently tested the enterprise class firewalls such as the Fortigate 7121, 7060E and 6500F. Working closely with Fortinet, the alpha units of the 7081 were involved in rigorous tests to identify the limits of their decrypt capabilities and the results were significant. Supercybex designs the data center pods for these devices with N+1 power redundancy with multiple power utilities, generators, battery banks and PSU to ensure the highest levels of uptime where downtime is not an option. In these cases power efficiency is nice but usually not the critical factor in evaluation.
How else do you propose to inspect all such traffic for threats and data leakage ?
This is how all firewall vendors do it only fortinet do it with real performance, the other vendors ssl throughput is pathetic. Palo alto for example don't even publish their figures because they are so awful.
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