Choose the M6850 when you need the most throughput WatchGuard offers in the M Series, or you're planning for big growth. It's built for data center edge and high-growth deployments where full security scanning has to keep up with very heavy traffic, and it's the only model in the family with 100 Gb ports built in.

Yes. The M6850 includes 2 x 100 Gb QSFP28 ports alongside 8 x 1 Gb RJ45, 6 x 1 Gb SFP, 10 x 10 Gb SFP+, and 4 x 25 Gb SFP28, for 30 ports in total. The OCP 3.0 bay is still open, so you can add a 4 x 25 Gb SFP28 card or another 2 x 100 Gb QSFP28 card. Install cards with the appliance powered off.

The M6850 supports 67 million concurrent connections, 5 million concurrent proxy connections, and 330,000 new connections per second. Branch Office VPN and Mobile VPN tunnels are both unrestricted, so a large hub and spoke network won't run into a license cap.

Every M6850 includes an EDR Core license with 250 sensors and 4 WatchGuard System Manager licenses. For security services, you'll pair it with Basic Security or Total Security. Total Security adds APT Blocker sandboxing, DNSWatch, IntelligentAV, ThreatSync, longer WatchGuard Cloud data retention, and Gold 24 x 7 support. Firewalls.com can quote both suites and handle renewals.

You choose cloud or local management during setup. WatchGuard Cloud gives you over 100 built-in reports and dashboards, while local management runs through Fireware Web UI or WatchGuard System Manager. Logging also supports Syslog and SNMP v2/v3 if you send data to your own monitoring tools.

The M6850 moves up to a 24-core processor with 64 GB of memory, compared to 20 cores and 32 GB on the M5850. Full HTTPS inspection with IPS rises from 13.8 Gbps to 18.5 Gbps, IPsec VPN from 26.0 Gbps to 32.0 Gbps, and concurrent connections from 38 million to 67 million. It also adds 2 x 100 Gb QSFP28 and two more 10 Gb SFP+ ports. Both share the same 1U chassis, OCP bay, and hot-swap power and fans.