The FortiGate-3810A and -3016B represent the next steps up from the FortiGate-3600A device launched earlier this year, offering respectively 26Gbps and 20Gbps on their firewalls, compared to 8Gbps on the 3600A, said Phil Keeling, regional director for the UK, Ireland and South Africa at Sunnyvale, California-based Fortinet.

Keeling said they extend the high end of the company’s fixed-format devices, with the next family up from the 3000 Series being the 5000, which is a chassis-based range targeted at carriers and very large enterprises. The performance increase compared to the 3600A is achieved by adding a new networking ASIC, the FortiASIC-NP2 Network Processor, to work alongside the FortiASIC-CP6 Content Processor, as well as offering hardware acceleration for the GbE interfaces.

In terms of absolute capacity, the 3000 Series is fixed rather than modular in format, but Fortinet is offering upgrading on the connectivity side, since both the new devices have the ability to move from GbE SFP interfaces to 10Gb XFP ones, thanks to the inclusion of Advanced Mezzanine Card technology. The AMC specification, also known as AdvancedMC, is an open standard developed by the PICMG consortium to meet the next generation requirements of carrier class hardware.

Fortinet is offering significantly higher throughput on these boxes than its nearest competitors in the firewall space, which it said are the NS5400 from Juniper and IP690 from Nokia for the FortiGate-3810A, and the NS5200 and IP560 for the 3016B. All these devices are firewalls rather than multi-function boxes, though the companies behind them are among the most high-profile and active marketers.

In the high-end UTM space, there is also Crossbeam, which does not develop all the various security functions itself, but provides the high-speed infrastructure on which customers can run various vendors’ technology, including Check Point’s.

Fortinet obviously touts its ownership of the entire product, including the underlying ASICs, where Crossbeam blows the best-of-breed trumpet.

Keeling said pricing for the new products will be released shortly, with general availability scheduled for the third quarter.