Description
Fortinet FortiGate 2500E (FG-2500E)
“High-throughput core firewall with heaps of copper + 10G, plus built-in 10G bypass for fail-open designs.”
This is a really practical pick for data centre edge / core refreshes where you need lots of 1G RJ45, some 10G SFP+, and bypass ports for resiliency.
At-a-glance performance (Enterprise Traffic Mix)
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IPS: 11.5 Gbps
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NGFW: 9.0 Gbps
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Threat Protection: 5.4 Gbps
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SSL Inspection (IPS avg HTTPS): 9.4 Gbps
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IPsec VPN (512B): 95 Gbps ✅ huge
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SSL-VPN throughput: 6 Gbps
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Recommended concurrent SSL-VPN users: 30,000 ✅ very high
What that means: strong VPN scale, good SSL inspection, but Threat Protection throughput is the main limiter if you’re planning “everything on” + malware at high sustained throughput.
Ports & interfaces (the big selling point)
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32 × GE RJ45 ports (plus 2 × GE RJ45 MGMT/HA) → 34 total RJ45 physical
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10 × 10GE SFP+ slots
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2 × 10GE SFP+ bypass ports (SR optics, LC connector) ✅
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Console + USB
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Internal storage: 1 × 480GB SSD
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Form factor: 2RU, dual AC hot-swappable PSU
What “10G bypass” is (simple explanation)
Those 2× 10G bypass SFP+ ports are designed so that if the firewall loses power or fails, traffic can physically pass through the bypass pair (fail-open), which is handy in designs where keeping a critical link up matters more than blocking during an outage.
Scale & capacity (enterprise)
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IPv4 firewall throughput (1518/512/64 UDP): 150 / 150 / 95 Gbps
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Latency (64B UDP): 2.00 μs (very low)
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Firewall throughput: 145.5 Mpps
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Concurrent sessions (TCP): 20 million
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New sessions/sec: 500,000
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Firewall policies: 100,000
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VDOMs: 10 default / 500 max
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SSL inspection concurrent sessions: 2 million
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FortiAPs: 4096 total / 2048 tunnel
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FortiSwitch: 196
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FortiTokens: 20,000
View data sheet: FortiGate 2500E Series Datasheet
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