FortiGate 3500F Series | NGFW

## Overview The FortiGate 3500F Series is a high-performance next-generation firewall (NGFW) from Fortinet designed to deliver industry-leading threat protection, intrusion prevention, and SSL inspection. The appliance is housed in a compact 2RU form factor while offering one of the highest port densities available on the market.

## Key Hardware and Design The 3500F includes two high-availability 25 gigabit SFP28 slots, 30 standard 25 gigabit SFP28 slots, and six 100 gigabit QSFP28 slots. The 3501F variant adds two 2TB onboard SSDs for logging flexibility. Power redundancy is provided through two hot-swappable power supplies to optimize connection performance and reliability.

## Technical Architecture The firewall leverages Fortinet's breakthrough security processing architecture. Three NP7 network processors work inline with FortiOS to deliver superior performance for multicast traffic, VPN, CGNAT, WAP, and IP tunnel acceleration. Eight CP9 content processors (Fortinet's 9th generation custom security processing units) handle pattern matching acceleration, application identification, pre-scan signature correlation, and real-time IPS signature matching to support the main CPU.

## Performance Specifications The 3500F Series delivers exceptional throughput capacity: 595 gigabits per second firewall throughput, 165 gigabits per second IPsec VPN throughput, 72 gigabits per second IPS throughput, and 65 gigabits per second next-generation firewall throughput. Threat protection throughput reaches 63 gigabits per second. With the hyperscale license and NP7 processors, the device supports up to 5 million connections per second. The platform also provides elephant flow and VXLAN acceleration for hybrid and hyperscale data center deployments.

## Deployment Capabilities The 3500F Series supports extensive deployment flexibility for network segmentation, secure web gateways, intrusion prevention systems, and mobile security. CGNAT is optimized for both 4G and 5G mobile security deployments. The appliance is positioned for deployment at the enterprise edge, in hybrid data center cores, or across internal network segments.

## Takeaways The FortiGate 3500F Series is positioned as an ideal partner for large enterprises and service providers requiring high-performance, multi-layered security in a compact form factor. Its combination of specialized network and security processors, high port density, and substantial throughput capacity makes it suitable for complex network environments demanding both performance and comprehensive threat protection.