Fortinet FortiSwitch T1024E

The 1024E on copper: twenty-four 10GBASE-T ports with two 100 Gigabit uplinks.

Ten Gigabit Without Optics

The T in T1024E is 10GBASE-T: ten Gigabit over ordinary Cat6a copper rather than fibre. For a rack of servers already cabled in copper, or a deployment where buying forty-eight transceivers would cost more than the switch, that is the whole case. The uplinks are still 100 Gigabit QSFP28, so only the access side is copper.

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.