Fortinet FortiGate 3140B review

The latest FortiGate 3140B is part of a family of products offering enterprises high performance along with a selection of 10GbE and Gigabit ports.

As with all FortiGate appliances, the 3410B uses the firm's ASIC-based FortiOS operating system and offers a range of port permutations. You have eight 10GbE SFP ports to the left, ten Gigabit ports in the middle and two more 10GbE SFP ports to the right. The latter port pair links up with Fortinet's FortiASIC-SP2 CPU which provides additional services including IPS signature analysis, application controls and DOS protection.

The appliance includes a 64GB SSD for high speed web caching, logging, DLP archiving plus quarantining and there's room for three more for a total capacity of 256GB. Standard features start with an SPI firewall plus IPSec and SSL VPNs but the price we've shown includes a full one year security bundle.

This adds extra security measures comprising IPS, anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-spam, web filtering, P2P app controls plus data leak prevention (DLP). The appliance can also provide centralised management of Fortinet's FortiAP wireless access points.

The console's home page provides a dashboard offering plenty of information and options to customise the views using widgets

Easy deployment

An advantage of the FortiGate products is all their security services are developed in-house so there's no reliance on third party providers. Installation is simple as you choose either NAT or transparent modes from the intuitive web interface and for testing we opted for the latter.

The console's dashboard provides a wealth of information about real-time activity and its use of widgets means it can be customised. These include graphs for traffic history, top applications and sessions, system resources, SSD usage and quick access to the CLI.

A choice selection of UTM profiles can be added to firewall policies and includes versatile web content filtering