Fortinet FortiSwitch 1048G

Forty-eight 10 Gigabit SFP+ ports, six 100 Gigabit uplinks and MACsec.

Aggregation With the Links Encrypted

MACsec at this tier matters where the fibre between racks, floors or buildings is not entirely under your control - a shared riser, a leased duct, a co-location cage. Encrypting at layer 2 protects everything above it without touching the application. The 1048G pairs that with forty-eight 10 Gigabit ports and six 100 Gigabit uplinks.

100 Gigabit Uplinks and Hot-Swap Everything

These are spine and core switches rather than access ones: 100 Gigabit QSFP28 uplinks, hot-swappable supplies, front-to-back airflow for a hot-aisle rack, and sub-microsecond latency. They still speak FortiLink, so a FortiGate can manage the core alongside the edge, but their job is aggregation and east-west capacity rather than connecting devices.

Managed as an Extension of the Firewall

A FortiSwitch can run standalone, but the reason to buy one alongside a FortiGate is FortiLink: the switch becomes a logical extension of the firewall, so ports, VLANs and network access control are configured in the same console as the security policy. That removes the usual split between the team that owns the switch and the team that owns the firewall, and it is why NAC on these switches costs nothing extra.