FortiGate-6000F hardware description
Fortinet Technologies Inc.
FortiGate-6000F back panel
The FortiGate-6000F back panel includes three hot swappable cooling fan trays and three hot swappable redundant AC
power supply units (PSUs). For more information on power connections and redundant power, see
power supply units (PSUs) on page 17
The back panel also includes the FortiGate-6000F ground connector that must be connected to ground.
FortiGate-6000F back panel (FortiGate-6501F AC model shown)
FAN 1
PSU1
PSU3
SSD1 SSD2
FAN 2
FAN 3
Fan Tray 3
Fan Tray 2
Fan Tray 1
Power
Supplies
1, 2, and 3
SSD Log Disks
(6501F and 6301F)
Ground
Connector
FortiGate-6000F schematic
FortiGate-6000F hardware includes a data plane and a management plane. The data plane processes customer
network data. The management plane handles management functions such as administrator logins, configuration and
session synchronization, SNMP, and other monitoring, HA heartbeat communication, and remote and (if supported)
local disk logging. Separating these two planes means that resources used for data processing are not compromised by
management activities.
In the data plane, two DP3 load balancers use session-aware load balancing to distribute sessions from the front panel
interfaces (port1 to 28) to Fortinet Processor Cards (FPCs). The DP3 processors communicate with the FPCs across the
3.2Tbps integrated switch fabric. Each FPC processes sessions load balanced to it. The FPCs send outgoing sessions
back to the integrated switch fabric and then out the network interfaces to their destinations.
The NP6 processor in each FPC enhances network performance with fastpath acceleration that offloads communication
sessions from the FPC CPU. The NP6 processor can also handle some CPU intensive tasks, like IPsec VPN
encryption/decryption.
FortiGate-6000F 6.4.2 System Guide
13