FortiGate 60C boosts branch office performance

Fortinet today updated their product line with the official release of the FortiGate 60C UTM firewall.  This device replaces the existing 60B series, and adds a huge boost in both performance and features.  Thanks to our distributor Boll, Edifice Communications has already received its first 60C, which we are currently testing in our lab, before rolling out to a client.
The 60C is designed for the small office or branch office markets, and is the first unit to feature Fortinet’s new “System-on-a-chip” (SoC) architecture, combining multiple processors into a single chip, and it is this architecture that gives the series its extra power.  In numbers, this means raising the firewall performance from 100 Mbps in the 60B series, to 1 Gbps in the new FortiGate 60C series.
As well as boosting performance, there are also some new features that are very welcome.  Not least is the addition of an integrated SDHC slot, pre-populated with a 4GB card, ready to be used for local storage and logging capabilities.  This opens up possibilities such as buffering log data on the device, then uploading to a FortiAnalyzer at pre-defined times, thereby controlling at what times log data is sent across the network.  Also, upgrading the SDHC card to 16GB allows use of the WAN optimization and web caching capabilities; features up till now only available on larger models with built-in hard-drives.