Cybersecurity firm Fortinet Inc. today announced two new campus switches designed to support the growing connectivity and security needs of campuses.

The new FortiSwitch 600 and 2000 offer high performance, embedded intelligence and seamless integration with Fortinet’s AIOps management tool and FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services.

The switches have been made to meet the needs of a “modern campus” that requires more bandwidth than ever before, with many organizations investing in next-generation wireless access points to provide increased connectivity. Fortinet argues that legacy switching solutions often can’t keep up and that to ensure network availability and a positive user experience, organizations need high-performance switches that intelligently organize access point traffic and prevent bottlenecks.

The FortiSwitch 600 and 2000 expand Fortinet’s scalable switching portfolio with performance and port density to meet the demands of the modern campus and scale as connectivity needs grow.

The FortiSwitch 600 series offers a multigigabit secure campus access switch with up to 5-gigabit Ethernet access and 25-gigabit uplinks to optimize network performance by intelligently supporting traffic from next-gen access points to business-critical destinations. The FortiSwitch 2000 series offers similar but is designed to support larger, more complex campus environments by aggregating high-performance access switches, like the FortiSwitch 600. Both include a dual power supply for the redundancy high-performance campuses require.

The new switches announced today are the latest additions to Fortinet’s secure connectivity platform, which provides comprehensive security, access control and unified management throughout the local-area network.

Customers that use FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls as a switching controller are said to eliminate overlays while benefiting from FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services like advanced malware protection, IPS, sandboxing and web filtering. All FortiSwitch models integrate with FortiAIOps, Fortinet’s AI for information technology operations tool that provides real-time insights into potential network issues and automates manual tasks.

“Fortinet has delivered secure switching solutions for 20 years, making it uniquely positioned to empower customers with a comprehensive, secure connectivity solution for the entire LAN,” John Maddison, chief marketing officer and executive vice president of product strategy, said in a statement. “We are the only vendor offering fully converged wired and wireless networking and AI-powered security through a single platform, providing visibility and security from the moment a user or device connects to the network.”

Fortinet was last in the news in August when it announced that FortiSASE, the company’s secure access service edge offering, is now integrated with its wireless local-area network portfolio with the goal of providing more options for remote workers and distributed edges to connect securely.

Image: Fortinet