FortiGate 4400F

The FortiGate 4400F is the top model of Fortinet's standalone NGFW family. In a 4U rack body it produces 1.15 Tbps IPv4 firewall throughput with 1518 byte UDP packets, plus 94 Gbps IPS, 82 Gbps NGFW and 75 Gbps Threat Protection throughput under Enterprise Mix traffic; a single appliance carries 210 million concurrent TCP sessions. In this class the right question is not "how many users" but "how many new sessions per second and how many Gbps of inspected traffic".

Every figure on this page is taken from Fortinet's official FortiGate 4400F Series datasheet (Fortinet, 2026) and cross-checked against the July 2026 Fortinet Product Matrix document; both documents list firewall throughput as 1.15 / 1.14 / 0.50 Tbps (Fortinet Product Matrix, 2026). An independent measurement also supports why this capacity is needed: CyberRatings.org reports that more than 95% of global web traffic is encrypted and that some of the firewalls tested suffered a marked performance loss while inspecting encrypted traffic (CyberRatings.org, 2025). On this appliance SSL inspection reaches up to 86 Gbps and the workload is offloaded to the CP9 content processor.

What size of organization is the FortiGate 4400F right for?

The 4400F is built for the core layer of Tier-1 telecom operators, hyperscale data center operators, large internet service providers and systemically important financial institutions. The decisive criterion is not bandwidth but session economics: 210 million concurrent TCP sessions, 1 million new sessions per second, 400,000 firewall policies and a maximum of 500 VDOMs. On the mobile operator side, the NP7 network processor accelerates NAT44, NAT444, NAT64/DNS64 and NAT46 translation in hardware for 4G Gi/sGi and 5G N6 interfaces; 40,000 gateway-to-gateway and 200,000 client-to-gateway IPsec tunnels can be terminated in the same body. If your traffic is clearly below these thresholds the appliance is oversized — with 589 Gbps of firewall and 140 million sessions, the FortiGate 3700F is sufficient for most large data centers. You can review all the options side by side on our FortiGate product family page.

What does the Hyperscale Firewall license change on the 4400F?

The Hyperscale Firewall license is a perpetual license and it enables hardware session setup, hardware firewall session logging and hardware NAT on the NP7 network processor. Its effect is visible directly in the spec table: concurrent TCP session capacity rises from 210 million to 700 million, and new sessions per second from 1 million to 10 million. The datasheet states in an explicit footnote that these two values apply only while the license is active. In CGNAT-heavy carrier scenarios — mobile and broadband access networks where sessions per subscriber run high — the metric that determines the project is not throughput but precisely these two numbers. Without the license the appliance keeps working, but session setup and logging remain on the CPU side and the ceilings above cannot be reached.

What is the real difference between the 3700F, 4400F and 7081F?

The distinction between the three models does not fit into a single "faster" statement: the Threat Protection throughput of the 3700F and the 4400F is identical (75 Gbps); the difference is in firewall bandwidth, session capacity, SSL inspection power and interface type. Every value in the table below is taken from the relevant model's official Fortinet datasheet.

The most frequently misread row in the table is the interface row: the fastest port on the 4400F is 100GE QSFP28 and the appliance has no 400GE ports. Designs that require 400GE move either to the 3700F with its 4x 400GE QSFP-DD or to the FortiGate 7081F chassis with 16x 400GE QSFP-DD. In the same way, the Threat Protection row shows why the assumption that "the bigger model is faster on every metric" is wrong.

Which interfaces are available and how should FortiOS be planned?

The interface structure of the FortiGate 4400F is as follows: 12x 100GE QSFP28 / 40GE QSFP+ hardware-accelerated slots, 16x 25GE SFP28 / 10GE SFP+ / GE SFP slots, 2x 25GE HA slots, 2x 25GE AUX slots, 2x GE RJ45 management ports, 1x USB 3.0 and 1x console port. The FG-4401F variant ships with 2x 1.92 TB internal SSDs; both variants include a Trusted Platform Module that generates and stores cryptographic keys in hardware. On the high availability side, Active-Active, Active-Passive and Clustering configurations are supported; in critical environments you should plan a cluster of at least two appliances rather than a single unit.

The FortiOS release is a separate planning topic. Fortinet datasheets do not state which FortiOS release the performance figures were measured on; release selection is therefore a lifecycle decision, not a performance one. Bulletin CSB-260330-1, published in March 2026, extended engineering support for FortiOS 7.4 to May 11, 2027 and its end of support to November 11, 2028, and engineering support for FortiOS 7.6 to July 25, 2028 with end of support on January 25, 2030 (Fortinet Community, 2026). FortiOS 8.0, meanwhile, was announced on March 10, 2026. For an investment with a planned amortization of more than five years, the Long-Term Supported release policy and a FortiCare Elite contract should be evaluated together.

In deployments in Turkey the practical constraint is usually electrical power and cooling: the appliance is a 4U high, 37.1 kg platform that draws 1533 W on average and 1875 W at maximum, produces 68.9 dBA of noise and uses front-to-back forced airflow; the power supplies are 2+2 (AC) or 1+1 (DC) redundant and hot-swappable, and the fan tray is hot-swappable as well. That profile must be calculated before ordering in colocation spaces with a limited power budget per cabinet. On the regulatory side, the distinguishing leverage of the 4400F is policy and domain density: with 400,000 firewall rules and a maximum of 500 VDOMs, a PCI-DSS cardholder data environment, the production/test separation required by the BDDK (Turkish banking regulator) information systems regulation, and traffic belonging to different data controllers under KVKK (Turkey's data protection law) can all be isolated from one another in the same 4U body. Hardware firewall session logging, unlocked by the Hyperscale Firewall license, produces per-subscriber audit records in CGNAT networks without saturating the CPU — the point where carrier audits most often stumble. As a Fortinet authorized channel partner, Sora Yazılım designs this architecture and runs the licensing, deployment, migration and managed service phases.

The FortiGate 4400F is an investment that wastes money when chosen too large and creates congestion when chosen too small. Share your current concurrent session count, peak throughput, SSL inspection ratio and CGNAT requirement; we will report which of the 3700F, 4400F and 7081F is right, together with the official datasheet figures. For a sizing study and a quotation request you can reach us through our contact page.